‘You aided a terrorist.’
Fuck. Still, not like I wasn’t expecting this one. I shake my head in pained disbelief and sit down with a sigh. ‘These are pretty hectic allegations, Jane. Where is this proof?’
‘Are you denying them?’
‘I want to know where your proof is. You’re accusing me of… insane stuff, conspiracy against the company, corporate sabotage, and as for terrorism! That kind of crap could lead to serious jail-time, disconnect.’
‘Execution even.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘We’re thirty-two storeys up.’
There are employee suicides, occasionally. Wall Street Crash syndrome, even though those reports of executives throwing themselves lemming-like from tall buildings in 1929 were apparently severely exaggerated. Today, it’s usually because someone can’t hack the pace, typical burn-out, but sometimes it’s because they’ve realised there’s no get-out-of-jail-free card when they get bust siphoning off funds or selling proprietary information to a competitor. But then, windows in skyscrapers are usually designed not to open. Jane catches me looking.
‘You have to break through. Hell of a momentum required. Sometimes we toss a chair through first.’
‘I want a representative.’
‘Would you like to see—’
‘A lawyer? Yes. I would, actually.’
‘No. The evidence.’
She picks up a remote control for the wall2wall display, taps it against her lips.
‘You sure you want to go here? It’s not too late.’
‘No, no, I want to see.’ How bad can it be? How much can they have? I wrap my hands around my knees and lean in. I am the anticipation of vindication.
She hits the button. The wall powers up on a folder system I recognise immediately as our central home™ cache, accessed remote. I relax imperceptibly. I’m careful about cleaning up, about auto-deleting, running shells and reroutes. If this is all she has… but then she clicks through to another folder entirely, her stash of Mexican soap operas. Episode 212 of Ángeles de la Calle. Which is not, when she presses play, the story of love and life and death and betrayal in the favela. It is a recording of every transaction I’ve ever performed on my cell phone, which means they chipped it, downloaded it direct, every message, every time I connected to the triplines, probably every one of my calls. Jane smirks.
I have nowhere else to go.
‘You’ve been an awful bitch to live with, you know that?’ She blinks, and I lunge to the attack. ‘You’re boring. You’re anal. You have no imagination and almost no talent to speak of. This…’ I waft a hand at the dogs, the man with the semi-automatic. ‘Why doesn’t this surprise me?’
‘You’re not taking this very seriously, Ms. Mazwai.’
‘You’re a pathetic gutless bureaucrat who couldn’t hack it in the real world, Jane. I always wondered how you got to this level. Are you even genuine Internal Affairs, or just some nasty little snitch spying on your colleagues? And cut the “Ms. Mazwai” crap. I’ve shared a bathroom with you for over eight months.’
‘This isn’t helping you.’
‘Get me your superior officer. Now.’
‘We’ve been watching you.’
‘Who is it? Rathebe? Mogale? Give me a name.’ I pull out my phone. The man with the gun shifts behind me, causing the dogs to stir. She makes an impatient placatory gesture, waiting me out.
‘How do you think you got away with this?’
‘This is bullshit. This is not company policy. This is fucking intimidation. Give me a name.’
‘You think you’re that good?’
‘Fuck this. Fuck you, you crazy bitch.’ I speeddial reception thirty-one floors down, entertaining visions in my head of someone, anyone charging upstairs to my rescue.
‘Did you really think we wouldn’t notice?’
‘Thembi? Hey, it’s Lerato. Can you put me through to Internal Affairs? Someone senior. I have a situation.’
‘We let you.’
I look at her blankly for a moment. I lower the phone. I am a crumpling façade.
Toby
Once it breaks, it’s kif deluxe. Total 360, matter of, what, an hour? From spitting up blood, to an endorphin overload equal to a bliss hit. I wonder if that’s intended, designed to make you more willing to hand yourself over, flooded with goodwill and lush happiness, or if they fucked up the formula one time. Maybe it’s the whisky, the bug burned up in the alcohol content we just poured into ourselves. Maybe they didn’t factor that in, didn’t get the lab rats loaded before they made ’em sick. Course, the bottle we sunk between us is starting to catch up with me. I smack my tongue against my parched palate.
Tendeka is looking savagely grim, but it’ll wane soon soon. It’s cos I’m thin, I tell him, fast metabolism, but he’s still on his apocalypse trip. He’s still trying to explain it away: ‘It’s your body’s natural response. It’s an old evolutionary trick of the mind, flood your system with happy chemicals when you’re dying.’
‘You don’t understand, buddy, I’m flying.’ I lug him towards my apartment. Despite his good intentions, I’m not going to hang around the street corner while he waxes lyric about the repressive regime and rights and clampdowns. Not when I’ve managed to avoid the cops, being arrested, the freaking Aitos prowling outside my door. And by the time all this is over, I will have wangled a new phone, found a legit excuse for why mine was stolen or schmangled, and everything will be back to normal.
Tendeka slurs something.
‘What? I can’t understand you.’
‘Alcohol. Adrenalin.’
‘Alcohol and adrenalin what?’
‘Why you’re feeling better.’
‘Yeah, yeah. You’ll see. Wait till it hits you. Any second now. It’s not the booze.’
‘My tongue is swollen.’
‘That would be the whisky talking.’
‘No, it’s…’ He wrenches forward and kotches a thick splodge of blood onto the pavement. There are globby bits in it. It’s seriously vile, and maybe I’m underestimating how he’s handling. Lucky then, kids, that his primitive hackjob of a key works perfectly on my apartment block’s door. We have to swipe it a few times over the door scan, which squawks in protest, but just when I’m ready to concede, the override goes through and it clicks open. It’s a handy thing to have, and when Tendeka doesn’t ask for it back specific, I pocket it.
He’s badly delusional by the time I lug him onto the roof of my apartment block, going on about getting skywards and future renovations, as if this were the time for home improvements. It’s very pretty up here. I should come here more often.
‘Is it casting? Is Lerato hooking us up?’
‘Course, man. Would I let you down? Oh, there I go.’ This is a joke, kids, cos I’m easing him down so he can sit, only he sort of keels to the side, so he ends up lying on his back instead. And then he curls half-foetal on his side.
‘Nice position,’ I say. ‘There’s a reason people lie on their sides like that, we covered it in first aid. I’m not remembering what it was, though. But it’s good. You got it right.’
‘Where’s the camera?’ His eyes dart around, hunting out the lenses in my coat.
‘All over. There’re like a thousand of them embedded in the fabric. Miniature. You can’t see ’em.’
‘Okay, tell them…’
‘Tell ’em yourself. You’re going out live. Just speak into the coat.’
He looks up and grits his teeth, focuses. ‘My name is Tendeka Mataboge.’
‘Excellent start.’
‘I’m thirty-two. I’m dying. It’s the only way to show… I’ve been infected with the M7N1 virus as an act of government-corporate censorship. Repression. This is human rights violation taken to its worst. They are wilfully killing their citizens. It’s… It is casting, right?’