I was scared for him. I watched Youtube. I could see how the protests were escalating. Shouting to stones to petrol bombs. Each step the police responded: riot shields to tear gas to guns. I told him I didn’t like him going down there. I told him he could get arrested, or go to jail and get his CPF pulled and he could never get credit or a proper job. I told him that he cared more about strangers than he did about people who cared for him. About me. We split up for a while. We still had sex. No one ever really splits up.
At first I didn’t know what had happened. All at once a dozen messages came up. OMG. Police shooting. People shot. Shots fired. Lyoto wounded, Lyoto okay, Lyoto shot. Messages coming in, one on top of the other. There was jerky camera feed: a body dragged into a shop door. Then sirens, ambulances arriving. All jerky, all shaking. Nothing in focus. In the distance, gunshots. Have you ever heard gunshots? I suppose not. No guns on the moon. They sound small and mean. All this information bombarding me, but I couldn’t pick the truth out of it. I tried calling him. No signal. Then the rumours started to coalesce. Lyoto had been shot. He had been taken to hospital. Which hospital? Can you imagine how helpless I felt? I called round everyone I knew who knew Lyoto, who knew any of his activist friends. Hospital Sírio-Libanês. I stole a bicycle. It took me seconds to hack the tracking chip. I rode like a madwoman through São Paulo traffic. They wouldn’t let me see him. I waited in the emergency room – there were police everywhere, and news cameras. I said nothing and sat at the back. The police would have asked me questions, then the news people. I listened and listened but I couldn’t hear anything about how he was. Then his family came. I had never met them, I didn’t even know he had a family but I could see at once who they were. I waited and waited, trying to overhear. Then the word came that he had died in the emergency room. The family were devastated. The hospital staff kept the police away. The news people got all the right shots. There was nothing to be done. Nothing to be taken back. Death keeps everything. I crept away on my stolen bike.
Lyoto died, and five others. He wasn’t the first to be shot, so no one remembered his name. No one sprayed it on walls and buses: remember Lyoto Matsushita. No one remembers the second man on the moon. I remember I was shocked; numb; terrified, but my chief emotion was anger. I was angry that he thought so little of me to put himself in danger of death. I was angry that he died in such a stupid way. I remember the anger, but I can’t feel the sickness, the set of the muscles, the pressure behind the eyes, the feeling of dying inside over and over again. I’m old. I’m a long way from that engineering student at USP. Does anger have a half-life?
I wonder, if he had lived, what Lyoto would have thought of me? I’m rich and I’m powerful. With a word I can switch off every light on Earth and plunge the planet into darkness and winter. I’m not even the one per cent; I’m the one per cent of the one per cent; the ones who left Earth.
Within a week we had forgotten about Lyoto Matsushita, the second martyr. There were new riots, new deaths. The government made promises and broke them all. Then came the first of a series of crashes, each one bringing the country and economy lower until it hit the ground and broke beyond any repair.
I didn’t know then that Lyoto was one of the first casualties in the class war. The great class war; final class war: the hollowing out of the middle class. The financialised economy didn’t need workers and mechanisation was driving the middle classes into a race to the bottom. If a robot could do it acceptably and cheaper, the robot got your job. The machines made you bid against them. The machines even supplied the apps you used to bid against them and against each other. If you were cheaper than a machine, you ate. Just. We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts in the local Extra and the alco station; online banking; self-driving taxis; an automated triage system in the hospital. One by one, the bots came and replaced us.
And here we are, in the most machine-dependent society humanity has ever produced. I’ve grown rich, I’ve built a dynasty on those very robots that beggared Earth.
My father didn’t remember the North Americans landing on the moon, but he told me old Mão de Ferro did. He was drinking in a bar in Belo Horizonte. The television was switched to the football and Mão de Ferro almost started a fight insisting the bar owner switch over to the moon landing. This is history, he said. We won’t see a greater thing on our time. Faked, the others in the bar shouted. Shot on a Hollywood sound stage. But he stood in front of the television, staring up at the black and images, daring anyone to turn it back to the football. And I remember when the Mackenzies put robots on the moon. I too was in a bar, with my study group. I had gone back to the homeland, to Minas Gerais, and DEMIN, the mining institute, for post-grad. I was even more of an oddity in Ouro Preto. No: I was unique. I was the only woman. The men were over-polite and clubbish. I would not let them leave me out, so I was drinking beer with them in that bar. The bar owner was flicking between sports channels when he dropped for a moment on to the news. I saw the moon, I saw machines, I saw wheel tracks. I shouted at the bar man – hey hey hey, leave it. I was the only person in that bar watching the screen, watching history happening. The Australian Mackenzie Mining Corporation had sent robots to the moon to prospect for rare earth metals for the IT industry. Why aren’t you watching this? I wanted to to shout to my group. Why can’t you see what I see? Call yourself engineers? Watching that screen I felt a flash of understanding, a brilliance in my head. I felt as if my breath were catching, as if my heart were skipping every third, fourth beat. It was feeling of the impossible becoming not just possible, but achievable. By me. Then the news item moved on – it was far down the news, no one was interested in space and science. News was what telenovella stars and models did. I went out of the bar into the beer garden and sat on the wall under the dusty trees and looked up into the night. I saw the moon. I said to myself, there are things up there, making money.
My father came to see me. He came on the bus. I knew instantly the news was bad. Ouro Preto was a long way but my father would have made an adventure out of the drive. He had lost the dealership. No one was buying high-end Mercedes any more, not even in Barra. He’d been carefuclass="underline" bought out the apartment and my education was safe. As long I delivered in the next two years and did not fill the fridge with beer on a weekly basis. But the business was over and at his age there was no hope of him re-skilling for the machine-code economy, let alone finding another job. He was sorry yet proud – he had done everything he could the best he could. The markets had failed him.
Then Our Lady of Tuberculosis came and knocked his plans off the table. Caio, boy-baby; kid brother. Caizinho: the runt of the litter we called him. He had never moved out, perpetually thirteen years old it seemed. As jobs collapsed and marriages failed and families imploded, the rest of Mamãe Corta’s seven babies moved back in. All but me. The learner, the keeper. Then Caio breathed in bacillus of TDR-tuberculosis – a bus, a classroom, mass. There were three types of tuberculosis then. MDR, XDR, TDR. Multiply Drug Resistant, Extensively Drug Resistant, Totally Drug Resistant. MDR resists the first-line antibiotics. XDR resists even the second-line drugs, which are basically toxic chemotherapy treatments. TDR: you can guess that. The White Lady we called it, and she wafted into Caio’s lungs and grew there.
Mamãe turned a room into a sanatorium; sealed it up with plastic. Papa engineered an air-conditioning unit. They couldn’t afford the hospital, they couldn’t afford the drugs. They bought experimental treatments on the black market – experimental Russian phages; chemo-hecked generic pharmaceuticals. I came home. I saw Caio through plastic. It wasn’t safe to go into the room. Mãe slid his meals in on trays my siblings stole from McDonalds, in through two layers of heavy plastic. Caio double-bagged the refuse. I saw him, I saw Pai tired to the marrow, I saw Mãe talking to her saints and orixas. I saw my brothers and sisters and their children scraping a réal where they could: scrap dealing here, buying and selling there, running an animal lottery there. Caio would die but I couldn’t begrudge my family saving every centavo in hope. They could not afford my completing my post-grad. There was a way I could finish. The advertisements had been appearing in the professional journals and sites, within weeks of the Mackenzie landing.