Zoo City Part 61

>>Cnapce/port >>Dest/Cape Town//453.10

Time to take out the trash.

Land of the Blind // Charlie Human

Agent HK Ideological Security Unit The corporate function of truth is to tell the various parts of the mechanism what to do. Of course it doesn't actually have to be truth, not in the absolute sense. It just has to fit in with the rest of the system. After this last kill, I understand that more so than ever.

My handler Shaw had been a commander in the apartheid security police. He wanted to show me how serious they were so he stopped me turning left for a week. Easy as implanting a neuromuscular programme that told my body that left turns were a no-go. "That's a level one programme" he said. "You're primed for level four." I tried to deviate a couple more times but eventually I just did what he said.

Drew

The factory bleeds iron and vomits sparks. I am luckier than some. Luckier than the endless supply of desperate people from the Rural who transport the ore and drop weekly from respiratory diseases.

I feel it coming on but there is only an hour left before the end of the day. All the signs are there; the flickering vision, the exhilaration, the hissing of a stove-top kettle and the smell of burning. Taking a break would bring down s.h.i.t from my supervisor. I carry on working even as the exhilaration builds and the world bleaches out.

I look around, blinking stupidly. Everything is saturated with light. One of the Rurals is pulling my arm and pointing at a spill on the factory floor. What the f.u.c.k is he trying to say? I can't tell. Is it oil? But it's too bright. A contorted shape lies next to the spill. I struggle to make sense of it... Joseph.

"Ja, it's like I tell everyone, this is a hard business and people get hurt," my manager says. Somehow I'm in his small office on the factory floor. "I know you have medical condition."

I cross my arms over my chest and huddle in the hard plastic chair. Joseph had been cleaning one of the machines, hunched over it sc.r.a.ping out the metal silt. When I whited out, I fell onto the control panel.

"Listen, I understand you're upset, but you can't blame yourself," my manager says. "Christ, these guys from the Rural can barely read and write, let alone operate machinery properly."

"It was my fault," I say.

"Who the f.u.c.k cares, the Riffa is dead," he says. I wince at the slur. My parents were staunch anti-cla.s.sists, and bigotry directed at Rurals always makes me uneasy. "His family will get paid out and everyone will be happy." He sighs, then hesitates, as if deciding whether to say something. "Andrew, I'm recommending a doctor, a corporate." I look at him, not understanding. I wasn't a Corporate Citizen; I didn't get corporate medical aid. "You're doing valuable work here, and XMET looks after its own," he says.

My phone buzzes with a temporary access card to Waterfront City. He puts a hand on my shoulder, like a fat pink spider.

"Listen, take a break, and spend some time with Kara." Despite everything, I'm surprised he knows my wife's name.

My voice is shaking as I tell her what happened. I hear her little nieces laughing in the background. Playing mommy has taken on an edge lately. Kara says she just wants to give her sister a break, but to me it looks more like practice Or an invitation. Or an ultimatum.

There's a long silence.

"I thought you said the fits weren't happening anymore, Drew," she says.

"They weren't."

She breathes out deeply.

"I'm..." I want to tell her what happened. I want her to understand. But I don't. "I'm going to be home late."

Agent HK

I watch the interview again. It's hosted on a trendy subversive site, one of ours. Like everything else, dissent is easier to control from the inside.

The vlogger is American, her hair tied back in blonde dreads under a R4000 Dolce & Gabbana beret. She's overwhelmed at meeting a real life resistance fighter. Matthew Ibrahim, one of the Lionesses' inner circle. He comes across as bitter, cynical, the girl's adulation seems to make him tired. I wonder if he'll feel guilty when his brother dies. If he comes back for the funeral it'll be like a gift to Shaw. A chance to kill the one that got away.

So, Matt, like how did you get involved with Thaba G.o.dima?

The draft. It appeared on my phone on my eighteenth birthday, indicated by the mandatory Governance ringtone. From that point on I had two days to reply or it was a Zimbabwean labour camp. There was no way I could join the Coporate Service Platoon and G.o.dima was the only other option.

Were you close to Nata Mzani? Is she as hardcore as people say?

I don't know if I'd describe the Lioness in those terms. She's incredibly focused. It's part of her training. She was with an MK cadre in Angola during the First Struggle, but after it ended, she refused to take a cushy job in the new government. They hated her for it, more for opposing them. She went into exile and then returned to plant the seed that was to become the Second Struggle and Thaba G.o.dima.

What did you do in Thaba G.o.dima?

I was a Changent, short for "change agent". We were an elite unit trained in G.o.dima camps to fight the power network of the ISU. Did you kill anybody? Did you kill anybody? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

And what was the deal with the Easter War. That was rough, right?

We had an alliance with the Soldiers of Gaia, an eco-survivalist movement who also opposed Corporate. We had a...falling out after they found some of our cadres cooking an endangered species of hare, but it was the bush, what were we supposed to do? They executed them mafia-style. It turned into a war. We only found out later it was a set-up. The ISU killed our guys and made it look like the Soldiers. We took the bait.

Like Drew will. How could he resist. I shut down the streamcast. It will be enough to link him to his brother, to bring everything tumbling down.

Drew

"Homemade bio-fuel, larnie," the cabbie says, smiling apologetically through missing front teeth. The old car splutters and jerks as he edges it into the stream of traffic, hooting as a cavalcade of black vehicles flashing blue lights roar past us

We pa.s.s the decaying Greenpoint soccer stadium. It looks like the skeleton of a giant spider squatting on the tar, the WELCOME 2010 decals faded but the plastic veneer of the grinning official mascot is still surprisingly bright. I wonder how anybody could have ever thought it was cute. It's a demon, a tokoloshe that grinned maniacally over the lean and brutal years that followed the World Cup.

We make our way slowly through the traffic toward the towers of Waterfront City. The contrast between it and the surrounding area is stark. Lush vegetation rises up from the gleaming gla.s.s towers.

I'm ushered in to see the doctor, a large man with soft, jowly face. "That's a Stone," I say gesturing at the large oil painting behind his desk of a mushroom cloud over Cape Town. I know from the art magazines my parents collected that it was called "The Spill", even though the real thing it hadn't been like that at all. There had been fires, sure, but not like that, more like a progressive poisoning of the land with radiation.

I thought it was garish, typical of Stone, the egocentric young African artist that had wowed the world, reaching superstar status before chaining herself to the body of an Aids victim in an unknown location and starving herself to death. She had doc.u.mented it by webcam as her last work and her final minutes were still one of the most watched clips ever. You could buy t-shirts with her emaciated face on them at Greenmakt Square.

He motions for me to lie down on his examining table as he consults my record on the medical database. I lie still as a hovering machine scans my brain from different angles. The doctor keeps up a subdued banter through the flashes, but I hardly hear what he says.

We wait in silence for the results to appear on his desk console. "Mr. Ibrahim, there's no easy way to say this," he says finally. "You have a severe form of epilepsy that has been improperly treated." He pauses to gauge my reaction. "Your episodes, as you call them, have caused lesions to form on the brain."

I nod and he continues.

"No patented medicine exists to treat this," he says. The world contracts to a tiny point in front of my eyes. I think of Kara and the children we'll never have. I know in that moment that if I can't be helped then I'm going to leave her. To give her a chance at the life she wants. And before she leaves me.