More than the price-tag, they rejected the notion that water was becoming a status symbol. She would drink tap water if she could, if it was safe. People still did of course, dirt-poor people, and those who shirked the warnings on homescreen and radio, people who believed it was all just a money-making racket, or worse, an post-Illuminati conspiracy. Thought of bottled water as the new Kool-Aid, wore Talking Tees that shouted ‘Don’t Drink the Water!’ that made you jump as you walked past.
But paranoia also has its price: hospitals have entire wings dedicated to water-borne diseases. Those and the SuperBug. It’s as if God/The Net/The Universe/Karma decided that not enough people were dying since the HI-Vax was invented so She replaced AIDS with a couple of particularly deadly strains of viruses.
The thought makes Kirsten feel navy (Blackbeard Blue); she can’t wait to get home. She hadn’t realised how tired she was, after the demanding shoot and this morning’s anxious appointment. She pulls the plaster off the inside of her elbow, revealing a light bruise and a blood freckle where the nurse had taken a sample at inVitro. The train slows to a stop. She surreptitiously drops the plaster and the CaraCrunch wrapper into a litterbin on her way out.
Kirsten loves the flat she shares with James in Illovo. It’s an old building with high, ornate pressed ceilings, parquet floors, and decorated in her shabby chic bohemian style, accentuated with knickknacks from their travelling and orphaned props from previous shoots.
It’s an old block, aged but sturdy. It has soul, she tells Marmalade, not like those new edge-of-cutting-edge buildings going up in town with their moving walls and pollution-sucking paint. Superglass everywhere so that you are constantly walking into walls. Hundreds of pivoting cameras to catch you walking into said walls. Not a comfortable chair in sight. Fake pebble fireplaces. Not like theirs, which they light with actual matches and feed with solid hunks of wood, and watch the florescent flames slowly work away at the grain.
God knows she likes this brick-and-mortar building, she thinks, punching the worn-out elevator button for the third time, but this lift could really do with a(nother) service.
Eventually it cranks into life, something whirrs and settles with a dull thud from above, and it begins its unhurried descent. Good thing I’m not in a hurry, she thinks, as the numbers-caught-in-amber buttons light up painfully slowly: 4.
There is another noise, closer, a shuffling behind her and Kirsten whirls around, expecting to see someone, but the lobby is empty. 3.
The overhead lights flicker, and she thinks: just perfect. She is in just the mood to walk up three flights of stairs in the dark. 2.
The lights seem to stabilise, and then they go out. The elevator stops mid-groan. She hopes there isn’t anyone stuck inside. The auto-generator will kick in any minute but the person trapped might not know it.
She flicks her watch’s torch function on and begins climbing the stairs. It’s hardly a searchlight, but it will do. She wishes James was home but he’d touched down in Zimbabwe a few hours ago, to work at the new surgery they had set up there. He had always spent a lot of his time grinding out of the country, but lately it seems that he is never home.
They often discuss emigrating: James would be cooking some wholesome dinner while she reads the Echo.news tickertape out to him, and on bad-news days, which seemed more frequent lately, they would invariably end up wondering out loud to each other how much worse South Africa could get before they seriously considered moving to a safer place. Sometimes, sitting in the dark of loadshedding, talking by candlelight, eating olive sourdough and cheese, they’d say all they wanted was a more efficient place, a country that didn’t seem as inherently broken. And while James was always ready to leave, eager to leave, Kirsten couldn’t bring herself to, as if bound by some stubborn magnetic force.
Kirsten is slightly out of breath when she reaches the third floor (Wheatgrass Shooter). When they first moved in she would say she lived on the green floor, or tell visitors to press the green button in the elevator, and they would think she was crackers. Of course there was no green button, and there was nothing green about the floor she lived on.
Marmalade understands her colours though: If he asks her how many slices of toast she’d like and she answers ‘red’ he would know that meant two. Or yellow: one. Wasn’t it obvious? No, he says, I’m just used to your type of crazy.
She walks down the dim corridor and fumbles at the door, dropping her access card. Swearing purple (Aubergine Aura), she bends down to pick it up and a dark figure steps towards her.
DON’T ASK
DON’T TELL
3
Johannesburg, 2021
Seth sits in the lab. It’s late, but he feels as if he is on the point of a breakthrough in the project he’s grinding. It’s his second last day at the smart drugs company and he wants to leave with a bang. It would be good for his (already enhanced) ego. He adds another molecule to the compound he is configuring on the screen of his Tile, subtracts one, then adds another. It’s almost ready.
Seth is the best chemgineer at Pharmax and he knows it. No one can map out new pharmaceuticals like him. To add to his professional allure – and to his considerable salary – he is known to be mercurial. No one company can pin him down for more than a year, despite offers of fast-tracking and bonuses. Some colleagues blame his exceptional intelligence, saying he bores easily, others, his drug problem. While both hold some truth, there’s a much more pressing reason Seth moves around as often as he does, which he keeps well hidden.
In the short ten months he had been at the pharmaceutical company he had already composed two first-class psychoactive drugs, and was now on the brink of a third. His biggest hit to date had been named TranX by the resident marketing team. It’s a tranquiliser, but modelled in such a way that while it relieves anxiety, it doesn’t make you feel detached or drowsy. After the tranquiliser hits your bloodstream, making you feel warm and mellow, it’s followed by a sweet and clean kick.
It’s all in the delivery system, he told his beady-eyed supervisor and the nodding interns as he showed them the plan. All about levels, layers, the way they interact with each other and the chemicals in the brain. The molecular expression was beautiful, they all agreed.
The drug before that was a painkiller. It didn’t just take your physiological pain away, it took all your pain away: abusive childhood, bad marriage, low self-esteem, you name it. It was one of his favourites, but then he always had a soft spot for analgesics. Based on the ever-delicious tramadol, Seth had used the evergreen African Pincushion tree for its naturally occurring tramadol-like chemspider, allowing for a rounder, softer, full-body relief, without the miosis or cotton-mouth.
Genius, if he didn’t say so himself. The formula wasn’t perfect though: too much of it was taxing on the liver. And he wasn’t sure what the long-term effects on the brain would be, but that was for the Food & Safety kids to figure out.
He knows he can babble about synapses and neurotransmitters all he likes, but the main reason he’s so good at this job, apart from the fact that he is an excellent mathematician, is because he tries all the prototypes on himself. Seth knows the company knows this, but they have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell arrangement, which suits them both well.
He moves to an appliance on the counter, clicks ‘print,’ and after a rattling he takes out a tray of pills. Shakes them down a plastic funnel and into an empty bottle, catching the last one before it disappears and popping it into his mouth. The bottle makes its way into his inside pocket after he scribbles on it with a pen. These particular pills are green; they look innocuous enough, like chlorophyll supplements, or Spirulina. His latest project involves experimenting with salvia, or Diviner’s Sage, as the hippies used to call it. Mexican Mint.