‘OK, so, why are you now drinking your own piss to go play on a blank VR canvas?’
‘It might be blank but it’s real, mfana. Completely real. As real as the ground you’re walking on right now.’
‘I get that. A very real experience.’
‘Completely real. One hundred per cent real. As real as what you’re thinking and feeling and experiencing now. As real as this step on the ground.’ He hopped slightly for emphasis, then again. ‘Come, Roy, I’m leading you to the obvious.’ Tebza moved ahead at a trot, then turned and faced me dramatically, the Energade bottle swinging from his fingers. ‘So, when I came around and saw that there was no one left in the flat, in the city, my first thought wasn’t that everyone else had disappeared—’
‘But that you had.’ The penny clanged on its way down.
‘Exactly.’ He fell back in next to me. ‘My first thought is the same one I keep on having now – that I hadn’t come out. That something had happened. That I was stuck.’
‘You still think that’s possible?’
‘Possible, yes. Likely, not so much. The group of us would have had more common experiences. Our frames of reference would have been more in alignment. I think, anyway. That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
We crossed over Simmonds Street. The sun blazed over the city. Late February. Lunchtime. Light wisps of wind ruffled our hair. Bright blue skies to our right, to the north. Purple thunderclouds rising up from the south.
We walked in silence, our footfalls echoing in the streets. Tebza swung the bottle carefully yet casually from his right hand.
I stopped, knelt and undid the shoelaces on my Nikes, then retied them, slowly. I felt the texture of the laces carefully with my fingertips, the combination of a million tiny threads. This lace could not be VR. It was too nuanced. Too subtle. The rub of it between my fingers too complex. I placed my open palm on the pavement and ran it across the gravel and the city dirt. Again, too textured. Too literal on my fingertips.
‘So, what?’ I remained kneeling, my laces now very well tied, Tebza hovering above me. ‘You’re saying that you and I – theoretically – could be flat out on our backs somewhere, not moving, and this’ – I rubbed my palm over the pavement again – ‘could all be interface?’
‘It’s possible. But I can’t find evidence, anything to support it. The glitch. The thread to pull on. If we were navigating via software there would have to be an outer edge. To the interface. You know this from Mlungu’s, where the edge is soooo obvious.’
‘More than. You have to pretend it’s not there.’
‘Exactly. Even with hack – I was told, but I never experienced it myself – there are limits, edges. Finely threaded and completely invisible, but if you push the right corner the interface will break and you end up back at the entry point. Problem with hack is that it’s seamless. I’ve been pushing at a lot of corners and have never found one. I still don’t know what they look like.’ Tebza flopped down next to me. We sat side by side on the corner of Simmonds and Anderson, facing a McDonald’s.
‘How does one push at a corner – practically speaking?’
‘Run hard at it. Drive fast at forty-five degrees until you smash into the koppie. That kinda thing.’
‘And nothing. No thread?’
‘Not here. And nothing on hack either. Which is why I keep on with the piss. I had one pill left.’ Tebza shook the Energade bottle sarcastically. ‘Which is now at about eighty-nine per cent strength, in this bottle.’
‘How does strength impact it? Does dilution create threads? Interface breakdown?’
‘It just shortens the duration. Designed that way. At the flat the pills would knock us out completely for two hours, and then we would come down through a set of screens designed to make re-entry easy. In total the whole thing would be about two and a half. Now, with just this pill and no network, there are no re-entry screens and it’s a rough jump back. Time is down to somewhere just over eighty minutes.’
‘So in there and out here you’re just looking at – pushing at – corners?’ I felt a little high all of a sudden. Tebza’s profile was cut out against the purple sky building steadily behind him. The thunderous backdrop made his skin look blacker, sharper.
‘Sho. Kinda. At some stage the system has to break down, and I want to know what the breakdown looks like. How to recognise it. Otherwise I don’t know what I’m looking for.’ He paused. ‘But it could also just be because I’m homesick for it. The last time I was there – genuinely there – I was having the craziest sex with Joy. It was extraterrestrial. Like we were aliens. Non-human. Past human. Maybe I want to relive that. I don’t know.’
‘And the others? You haven’t told anyone?’ I thought of Fats, hands behind his back, staring out of the third-floor window.
‘Nah. I mean, I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t bust me.’ He looked sheepish again. ‘I mean, it’s just too much, you know? Too far-fetched. Turns me into some kind of cyborg in everyone’s eyes, for no real reason.’
‘I get you. I’d like to try it though, for my own sanity.’ The words were out of my mouth before I had thought about creating them.
We talked and talked and talked on that pavement. It was the first emotive, heartfelt conversation I had had with anyone for years – certainly since the people disappeared, but also since well before that, stretching all the way back to that uncertain point in time when I withdrew from people, and from my life. The most obvious thing about our conversation – and I realised this fully at the time, and relished it – was the clarity. The smell of the impending rain. The burn of the afternoon sun on my skin, searing it. The silence. The way the absence of sound actually enveloped our voices. Each word had weight, fell down on top of the last and clattered.
Tebza’s emotional tap was wide open thanks to the comedown. He explained in passionate detail the intensity of the experience, his hand forming explanatory circles, his fingers drawing words and ideas in the pavement dirt. The cracking open of his cognitive horizon, his falling in love with the girl and the alien sex and, finally, his tipping over the edge of experience into compulsion and, yes, ultimately, addiction.
I followed Tebza intently, my tongue sliding in and out of the guillotine, slicing gently, evoking the smallest dribbles of blood. Slowly I began adding, telling, agreeing, and revealing those parts of myself that, well, that I had spent many years pushing down.
The clouds moved over us. Suddenly we were covered in rolling purple.
‘That is the point, isn’t it?’ Tebza said, rising to his feet. I remained sitting, knees tucked into elbows. ‘The desperation. We need people. Even when we hate them. Especially when we hate them.’