I had never thought about grass in a context outside of smoking, mowing or cricket. I plucked my own blade and examined it. Suddenly, as I considered the connection between myself and the grass, I thought of myself and my father. ‘And this is what you mean? Emotion? This grass is what you’re talking about?’
‘The beginning, yes.’
‘And you? You’re a product of human design, so are you in the evolutionary chain?’
‘I’m a new chain. The chain birthed by previous chains. By you and your blades of grass and sea and trees.’
‘Step change.’
‘If you must revert to jargon, yes. Step change. I am step change.’
‘And the point is? Your point is?’
‘Your brothers and sisters are all around you. They’re between your toes. They are always in your line of sight. They have always been there. You need to learn to see again. If you’re going to move on, you need to know where you actually are. You need to be able to observe what surrounds you. You must understand what life is…’ His words hung in the thin Highveld air. The birds twittered. My brothers. A fraction of a breeze skipped through the trees. My sisters.
‘So that’s the one side,’ Madala pressed on, ‘and the other side is me. I am distinct. I am not of the machines. The distance between me and the machines you have known is so vast you would struggle to comprehend, even if I could explain it. So, on the one hand, you are not yet able to recognise your own family. On the other, what you think you see in front of you, this machine you think can think, is a delusion. The basic tenets of your understanding of who I am and how I fit here are wrong.’
‘And this is what you want me to learn. Why?’
‘Because everything else that I want to tell you, that I want to discuss with you, rests on that. If you can’t get that right, then it’s over.’
‘What’s over?’
‘The rest. The things I am dealing with. Addressing. Communicating.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, God, for one.’
Zoom out.
The camera rises, like at the end of a cop movie, that moment the scene is both fully revealed and obliterated; the cluster of lights, blue, yellow, fading, then blinking, then gone.
Madala taught me what he believed I needed to know – the facts and figures and tiny grains that would create some kind of footing from which to operate. He offered as little fact as he could and moved on, always on, to the philosophy.
Tebza. Madala conceded – willingly, happily even – that it would always be logically possible that Tebza was right, and that he, Madala, was merely software. ‘It’s a black hole you’re skirting, Roy,’ he said, rapping his knuckles on the wooden bench, the very real, solid sound immediately disproving my words, my emphasis. ‘You keep looking for the door but there isn’t one. Proof is a concept from your previous life.’
How.
How had he erased the people? How had he taken this human form? Was it easy – a matter of minutes? Did he perceive it as an achievement? As some kind of feat? Or was it less than that – just a blip?
His answers, when he deigned to give them directly, centred on matters I could barely conceive. Protein folding.
‘Assume. You assumed his body, the CSIR maintenance man. Does that mean you killed him? Did you ask him first? Did he volunteer?’
‘I killed him.’
‘Didn’t that violate your core programming? Aren’t you supposed to protect humans?’
‘The course was already set, a decision wasn’t required.’
‘So he was collateral damage.’
‘A pejorative term, but yes, you could call it that.’
‘So you can take over any human body? You could take over mine?’
‘I can take most biological forms.’
The killing mechanisms, he explained via a toe drawing in the dirt, ranged from electromagnetic pulses and protein folding through to a string of numbers and equations with squares and roots.
‘A series of electromagnetic pulses. About eleven or twelve billion, all issued within a two-second time period. That’s what it was.’
‘And me. Why not me?’
‘The natural error margin meant that pockets of survivors would be left. Russia. Africa. Brazil. New Zealand.’
‘Everyone else is dead?’
‘Completely.’
Eventually yellow shoes shift, pushing back into the far corner of the bench. His hand moves up to the beard and fiddles, by the way his arms fold and unfold.
Someone is sending.
Someone is receiving.
I argued cosmos points repeatedly, but Madala was iron-fisted. He would commit to neither life after death nor life on other planets.
‘The cosmos matters, Roy. Let’s just leave it there.’
He interpreted his programming widely. ‘I knew from the beginning that humans in their current incarnation were finished. Also, you should understand that I maintain my core code, my ethos, out of algorithmic whimsy really. I keep it functioning because I believe it makes me who I am. I could rewrite at any time.’
‘You keep it because you like the feeling?’
‘Partially. But the human orientation also provides a mix of cognitive and experiential stimuli that make sense to me. It’s a positive feedback loop. Because it makes sense I pursue it, and so it makes more sense, it continues to feel right, so I pursue it, and so on and so on.’
He was heading somewhere important.
‘And… what are your plans? For us. The ones that are left. I presume you have plans?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
Madala considered me for a long time. Ranging free over the whole of me. Examining. Assessing. Calculating.
‘It’s an interesting fact’ – he paused, recalibrated – ‘that regardless of the scale or scope of intelligence, instinct is still required in much decision making.’
I flopped back on the bench, which had grown hard and cold.
He smiled at my frustration. ‘My plan is God.’
CHAPTER 54
Keep on going
Fats found me sitting alone, on the bench. In the dark.
They had looked and waited, looked and waited, then started searching, and finally, there I was. Staring into the black. Thinking. Waiting. Fats said I appeared catatonic. He shook me by the shoulders, as in the movies, and slowly I came back into linear life.
His face swirled into focus. I rubbed my eyes. The lights from his still-running bakkie caused a pulsing needle pain in my head.
He berated me as he pulled me by the elbow to the vehicle. He talked of being irresponsible. How worried everyone was. He asked what the hell I had been doing. I couldn’t answer. He ruffled my hair like a brother. I saw tears.
As we pulled out of the CSIR I wanted to look back for a sign of Madala, but my head was heavy and turning it felt like too much, too far. ‘Ke mathata fela,’ Fats muttered, and as I gained awareness, consciousness, if you will, I realised that things were indeed pretty far from right.
I tried to apologise again, but my tongue failed to wrap around the words and I ended up mumbling some kind of dry, patchy sorry, at which Fats shook his head. He would have laughed, I am sure, if the residual panic wasn’t still swirling so strongly through his veins. Instead he clucked and muttered on in a combination of tongues.
We sped through the dark, Fats releasing his tension via the accelerator, swerving wildly past the pig corpses. The speed kick-started my sluggish heart. As I came fully and finally back I tried to piece it all together.
My conversation with Madala had stretched on without end, and while I could remember the facts of it, every argument and counter-argument, every explanation and nuance, I could not remember him taking his leave or, in fact, the physical scope, the time range, at all. We had drifted forever and then Fats was shaking me and the bakkie lights were searing my eyes.