skyward* says we have to do it now, immediately. Trigger the lightbombs, hit as many of the vaccine centres as we can. We can’t let them submit. It’s a trick. There’s worse waiting for Ashraf and them than being arrested or disconnected. skyward* says they plan to ship them out to the Rural, put them into camps, detain and charge them as terrorists, even the kids. They might not come back. He says he never thought they would go this far, but isn’t this the ultimate proof of what they’re capable of, how fucked up the status quo really is?
But I’m confused. I thought it was a bluff. Not real. Not cause for concern, not reason enough for Ashraf to leave.
skyward* reassures me: yes, of course, but if they’re so casual about inducing widespread panic, lying to us like this, then what else have they been lying about? We have to stop it. We have to expose the underlying tumour in our society. This is not the time to have doubts.
And then Zuko comes back, staggering in, half-fucked on glue, which would be a red card, but under the circumstances, I’ll let it slide. Because he’s a true believer. And there’s work to do today, as skyward* keeps reminding me, the msgs coming in incessantly, like jabs with a sharp stick.
I don’t know how he knew where to find me.
Lerato
An incessant bleeping with an undertone of tango drags me rudely from the depths of REMsleep. I’ve been dreaming about cars loaded down on their axles with trickle castles, like the kind you make dribbling mud between your fingers at the beach, like Toby and I did a couple of years ago. Sturdier than dry sand, but still only sand, and when it dries out it all crumbles, like the castles on the cars, toppling around me.
At first I think Jane’s accidentally set off the burglar alarm again and I’m going to have to fend off the security Aitos bounding in to the rescue, but then I realise home™ is playing Buster Mzeke’s Asphalt Sonata, the song I assigned to work-related calls. I turn it off, roll over and go back to sleep for another twenty minutes. It is fucking Sunday.
When I get up, the apartment is oddly quiet. Jane is usually up by now, curled up on the lounger on the balcony with the Sunday papers and a chocolate hazelnut croissant fresh from the Communique bakery.
‘Jane? You want some ultra?’ I call, the volume of my own voice making me wince. On the Richter scale of hangovers, this one could have been responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. I check her room. No sign of her. Maybe she got laid after her big meeting. What are the chances?
She left the TV on, the menu open to her catalogue of soaps, which means she was up all night watching them instead of getting laid. We’re really gonna have to talk. I flick across to the cartoons while I wait for the coffee to brew.
But I’m feeling restless. I get up from the couch, go back to my room and throw open the cupboards. Soon I’m going to have to think about packing in anticipation of my brand-new life. I’ll have to shed a lot of it; even Jane would notice if I started emptying my room. I’ll take the special items: my music drive, of course, the Joey HiFi print I bought myself to celebrate my first-ever defection at the tender age of fifteen, the Miyazaki necklace a boyfriend bought back from Japan. Stash it all at Toby’s apartment for the duration. The furniture I’ve accumulated over the last couple of years, the Twenties medicine cabinet, the Nash couch, my books and most of my wardrobe are going to have to fly. It’s all about knowing when to let go. Because once it’s official, I won’t be allowed back on the property.
I’m not going to miss this place at all.
It’s only after I’ve had my coffee and the greasiest protein combo the kitchen can deliver that I get round to checking my message. It’s from Rathebe. Her hyperbole suggests some national crisis, without getting into any of the details. What I think is that it better be a new outbreak of the superdemic to force me into the office on the weekend. If it’s some baby stroller issue, I’m going to flip.
Kendra
When the swivel grinds through its rotate to open onto the landing, there is an audio notice stuck to the outside of the door that activates as soon as it senses us.
‘For your convenience, please find enclosed a digi map to your nearest immunity centre. This is a South African Police Services public service announcement.’
‘Cunts. Jesus. Motherfuck.’ Toby wipes his nose with his sleeve, rips off the GPS chip and scrunches it under his heel, only it doesn’t scrunch. ‘Fuck!’ He picks it up and hurls it across the corridor, but it’s so light it drifts to the left and ricochets off the wall with a dull plastic ting. He kicks the wall, then punches it for good measure.
He comes away shaking out his hand and still swearing. He looks shocking. His eyes are pouchy and bloodshot, and he’s pale under his scrag of beard. I still haven’t been able to face myself in the mirror. I’m grateful that I don’t feel like he looks. He’s already taken three painkillers this morning.
He cringes as we step outside the building, and tries to turn back for his sunglasses.
‘There isn’t time, Toby.’
‘Are you chaffing me? We still got thirty-two, thirty-three hours at least. And if we don’t make it, they can always come get us. They’ll have a roving unit. Door-to-door delivery. Now that’s servicing the community.’ But he tags along anyway.
We still don’t have a phone between us. When we tried to log in this morning, his connection was down. ‘The cabling in this fucking building,’ he muttered.
‘Does it go down a lot?’
‘Murphy’s law, innit mate?’ he says, putting on a jokey Brit accent. ‘It’s exactly the kind of crap that would go down today.’ But I can tell he’s unsettled.
Before we found the warning on the door, the plan was to find a public terminal, to get hold of his corporate friend, but now I don’t know. We might just be bringing the shit to her.
‘She can handle it,’ Toby says. ‘She’s a big girl.’ He spits a glob of phlegm onto the street in front of Truworths. A young house spouse coming out pulls her black leather handbag against her and steps pointedly around us.
‘Yeah, fuck you too,’ snarls Toby and starts coughing so badly, he has to lean against the window. Inside, there is a flurry of motion, and I grab his arm and pull him away before the security guard lumbers out to chase us away.
Glancing back over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass of the window among the moto-mannequins in gleaming fabrics. My face is totally healed.
Tendeka
The thing is, transparency only works as a policy if you can still find a way to make the stuff you don’t want people to see invisible – especially when it’s out in the open. We’re here to make sure there’s no possibility of hiding what has happened.
Who would have thought that so many were ready to give it up, turn turtle before it even kicks in, before they even know it’s going to kick in at all? Traitors to the cause.
And cowards, adds skywards* in yet another msg.
The emergency room at Chris Barnard Memorial is street level, a glass box beside the ambulance parking with a ramp that leads up and away to the parkade. There is already a queue of people outside, rumpled like they’ve been up all night, so everyone looks homeless. They’re pale and shocked and some of the more pathetic ones have convinced themselves they’re sick for real, doubled over and coughing, psyching themselves out, buying in, pushing to get to the front. There’s no sign of the media.
But there will be.
There’s been nothing on any of the newscasts, not even a suggestion on the alt channels, which implies that the clampdown on info is already in force. There are probably S&D teams working round the clock, scanning every blog, censoring every streamcast. Suppress and destroy.