The air was thick. Beatrice, hopefully unaware of the rape subtext shimmering beneath, cleared her throat as if to speak, but no words came. Babalwa was seated on the couch next to Fats and picked at her toenails nervously. Fats folded and unfolded his arms and stared into the middle distance as Tebza raged on.
I was all subtext. I watched Babalwa pick her toes and wondered again what her agenda was. Whether she had an angle on the rape thing, and, perhaps more importantly, whether she was in concert with Fats or not. My earlier reflections had led me to conclude it was against the odds that she had an agenda. More likely the memory had slipped out while she was in his arms and he, typical alpha, could not help but chase me down.
But if that was the case, it meant Babalwa truly believed I had raped her.
I would have preferred an insidious agenda.
I would have preferred a plot.
But she just picked at her nails. Pick. Pick. Pick. Fats staring ahead. The rain bombarding the roof. Beatrice clearing her throat, expectant.
The end of the world.
Beatrice clearing her throat one last time, standing, leaving.
Fats and Babalwa sharing a glance.
Me looking down, allowing myself to dream of another reality.
III
CHAPTER 29
We did our chores
With every sunset another cry echoed out and new predators arrived: feathered, clawed, horned. We watched the world reshape itself. The free pigs prospered quietly, growing in numbers and confidence, their enormous forms staking out swathes of turf, concrete and grass, which they now called their own. The predators followed them, of course. We slept listening to lions cough and hyenas laugh. We woke to the call of raptors. Vultures circled, and sometimes – often, in fact – I had the feeling they were waiting right above our property. Above us.
I tied a small, ladies’ revolver in a holster to my ankle, safety firmly on, when I ran.
We did our chores.
We fed ourselves.
The canned food went bad.
The bottled water became sour.
We became truly lonely.
We became alone.
CHAPTER 30
Just spectators
Teboho drank his piss regularly, the nanobots leaking out every time until he was scrabbling for five minutes, three minutes, one minute more.
He couldn’t let go of the idea of finding the door to our prison, nor of the hope that someone in a white coat watching over us in a location beyond our comprehension would take pity, let the bots in our system drain out and grant us exit. I would often catch him running for a corner. Ramming his shoulder hard into a wall, veering his car to the left or suddenly accelerating into a blind rise. When we were alone he would simply crash into objects and areas without pausing. One minute we were talking, the next he was thumping into a tree, a door, a piece of shrubbery.
Once he had revealed his secret to me, Tebza appeared to worry less about exposing his eccentricity to the others. ‘Sorry,’ he would say, mid-conversation. ‘I just, I just need to.’
He would target his spot, line it all up with eye and brain, lower his shoulder and bust into it. It was disturbing to me, who understood the rationale, but to the others it was plain crazy. Each attempt, each hard cement or brick encounter, doubled the confusion, which compounded again as the air was forced from his lungs and he groaned, sometimes falling to the ground, righted himself and then carried on, rubbing the shoulder, wincing abstractedly, adjusting his little white earphone as if the pause, the halt in the conversation or interaction, had simply been one of those things. As if he had merely been coughing, or wiping his nose.
When confronted he would duck, brazenly denying the reality just seen and experienced. ‘Thing I read,’ he would say, for example, deadpan. ‘The gym people reckoned you can harness the adrenalin of pain for muscle growth blah blah. Hurts like hell.’
His behaviour was so bizarre, so out of whack, they had little choice but to let it go. To confront him would be to challenge his essential sanity. And we were all a little too unhinged in ourselves for that.
Tebza, Fats decided, simply had a problem in his head. No one, he said, could possibly rack up that many cuts and bruises without some serious wire-stripping going on inside.
My heart ached a little more with every bump and crash, every trickle of blood, every scab formed. I was the only one who had an idea of where his dreams actually lay and how hard he was striving to reach them. And yet even I found it impossible to wake Tebza from his snowballing internal reverie. He took to his computers for longer and longer stretches, days at a time sometimes, pausing for only the briefest periods to piss or to wander outside for a late-night joint.
Tebza was roaming across two frontiers. He was desperate for a gap, for that hole in the fabric to finally stick his finger through, but he was also clicking and pinging constantly in search of the cloud, waiting for that single, telling beep that would change everything.
But it never came.
I drank his piss a few weeks after the Patterson Park discovery and our walking tour of the city. I expected the atmosphere of androids. The taste of outer space. What I got was a clear, simple canvas. A park with trees, like a golf course but without the fairway up the middle. A set of birds chirping and swapping places on the oak trees. A dam in the distance which I walked up to and drank from and swam in. Grass between my toes, tickling slightly.
I lay around. I rolled in it. Took off my clothes (the same clothes I was wearing in the real world, a nifty hack-programming trick). I held my dick in my hand and jerked it a little until I had a free, natural hard-on. I did a cartwheel. I pinched myself and felt the pain. I contemplated breaking a bone – a toe maybe – to test the outer limits. I climbed a tree.
‘Going in,’ Tebza said, ‘don’t expect anything. There’s no software other than the basic OS, and it’s very basic.’ But our earlier conversations dominated my expectations, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, given the barriers I’d had to hurdle to get there. Tebza’s piss tasted, well, like piss. It was tangy and urinary and all the things I expected. The taste lurked on my tongue for weeks after, a subtle yet compelling reminder of our hidden world.
Blank as the experience was, however, technically there was no questioning the hack accomplishment.
At Mlungu’s you always knew you were in an interface. The ground was blurry, the walls were blurry, everything was blurry, thanks to compression needed to keep the stream moving. The trick was never to focus too much, to keep your eyes in the middle distance, the range at which the imagery held best. You needed to keep moving too. If Lady Di approached you seductively, for example, peeling off a layer here, a bra strap there, reaching in your direction, there was an art to making the most of her invitation. The first trick was to get your dick out of your pants and into an orifice as soon as possible. The mixed rush of dopamine, serotonin and adrenalin would override your brain’s questioning of the JPEG stitching and enforce a kind of physiological suspension of disbelief. VR sex took off the way it did not only because everyone wanted to fuck, but because sex was the best way to enjoy the nascent VR experience. The sexual fizz provided the cognitive compression necessary to make the sketchy technology behind the whole thing work. As long as you were in a semi- or fully erect state, it was compelling. The final trick was to wet your nap – to use the popular phrase of the time – only when you were ready to leave. The vasopressin released by the brain during orgasm was short-lived, and after it had drained off you were left with the blurry JPEGs Mongezi had detested so. His innovation had vastly improved the paradigm, granted, but the basic limitations still dominated. Only the teenagers and the perverts were willing, or able, to keep going and going.