Moxyland (13 page)

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Authors: Lauren Beukes

Tags: #Fantasy, #near future, #sf, #Cyberpunk, #Science Fiction

BOOK: Moxyland
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   It takes an hour to get to Delft by train with the strikes. Of course, these don't affect the corporate lines.
   It's a 2k walk to the temporary residential hostel where Emmie's been staying; a severe three-storey block, identical to the hundred other severe blocks surrounding it, a warren of concrete bunkers. We've given Emmie an open invitation to come and stay with us, at least until she has the baby, but she always refuses, which makes Ashraf crazy with worry.
   'Temporary' residential is a hideous joke, of course. The two girls she shares a room with have been there for three and a half years, and still no word on when their assigned RDP housing is going to come through. It's another perfect example of the system's egregious failings. There's a backlog of 1,190,000 or something, and that's just counting the legal applicants, not the African refugees or the rurals coming in under the radar, the ones who can't afford to wait around for the proper health clearances.
   A man, scrawny and dark, not local, opens the door to the dank stairway. 'What do you want?'
   'Is Emmie here? We were supposed to meet her at the market–' Ashraf starts.
   'She's not here.' He tries to close the door on us, but I lean on it with my full weight, so he's forced backwards.
   'Emmie! You here? You all right?' I'm aware of Ashraf and the guy following in my wake as I pound up the stairs, three at a time. A kid with snot crusted down his lips peers down, blankly disinterested. A woman in the communal kitchen looks up startled from the
Daily Voice
with its screaming headline 'DYING FOR A CURE? MUTI MURDERS MULTIPLY'.
   'Emmie?'
   Her door is wide open, casting a rectangle of light into the corridor, but just before I get there, the security gate clangs hastily shut and a fumble of keys locks it tight.
   'Emmie. What are you doing? We spent hours looking for you. We had a meeting, remember? For Home Affairs?'
   Her hands curl round the bars of the security gate, real Pollsmoor. I feel that familiar knot at how painfully young she is, how naïve and far out of her comfort zone. She doesn't look up at me, staring down at the bulge of her belly. 'Go away. I can't see you today.'
   Behind her, there's nothing as obvious as a half-packed suitcase lying open on her bed, but something has changed in her room, with its scant possessions, the three beds barely a foot apart, with bedsheets hanging from the ceiling like dividers, the paraffin safestove, the brokendown Fifties kitchen cabinet that might be worth something restored, on which a small TV is balanced precariously among a clutter of cheap cosmetics. A piece of cardboard, an advert for a Sunlight Soap competition, is taped to the window to cover a broken pane, advertising a prize of one million clams, all those zeros clamouring for attention, insultingly unreachable, above the face of a grinning little white girl in pigtails.
   We've drawn spectators: the snotty kid and the reader, whom I recognise now as one of Emmie's roommates, and door guy, who is plucking insistently at my arm. 'You must go.'
   'Fuck off, bro! Emmie, listen to me. This is majorly important. I don't care what you did with the rent money from the stall. We'll get you another spot, more stock. Whatever. But you can't pull this disappearing act. If Home Affairs suspects this isn't makoya, you'll be deported.'
'I'm not staying.'
   'Don't be mental. Where are you going to go?'
   'You must leave, please.'
   I shrug door guy's hand off my shoulder. 'Emmie. Be reasonable. You have a job here. You have a real possibility of a life. What about the baby?'
   'You have to go. You must get out.' Door guy is trying to tug me away.
   'Jesus Christ! Will you get off!' I shove him against the wall, Emmie gasps, and only then do I click the fucking obvious that's been staring me in the face all along. The bedsheet with its pathetically faded floral print has been pulled closed around her bed for privacy. And among the coconut butter and hand cream and mascara is a man's deodorant, a man's brand shaving cream.
   'Ah, fuck, Emmie. Is this–?' But of course it is. Door guy blinks hard when I round on him, but then draws himself up, resilient, and why not? Compared to what he must have gone through getting here, who the fuck am I that he should be afraid of me?
   'Emmie. Why didn't you just tell me? Do you realise–? Fuck! I could go to fucking jail, Emmie. They could disconnect me for this. Permanently.'
   I shake the security gate, so hard that it judders, and Emmie cowers back, automatically putting one hand to the bump that has turned her bellybutton into a protruding jellytot. Babydaddy puts his hand over her fingers clutching the bars, reassuring. But where the fuck was he two months ago, when she was begging on the street corner, filthy and gaunt around the swell of her stomach?
   'What about your baby, Emmie? What are you going to say to your baby when you're all fucking starving to death in some underresourced camp in Lilongwe? Huh, Emmie?'
   'Tendeka.' Ashraf finally speaks.
   'I don't fucking care. You still have to do the interview. You are not going to put me at risk. And you are not getting our child – your child – deported. It's three years, Emmie, three years that we have to stay married before your residency is safe. You're not going anywhere until then, Emmie. You hear me?'
   'We need more money,' she says quietly, meeting my eyes for the first time, drawing strength from babydaddy, closing me out.
   'Fine. Of course. Whatever you want. How much?'
   'Eight thousand. Mr. Hartley only gave me half–'
   'Yeah, you should have thought that one through.'
'C'mon, Tendeka.'
   'Cut it out, Ashraf. She can have it after the fucking interview. You hear me, you manipulative lying cow? After.'
   Ash wants to talk about it, all the way home. 'It doesn't mean it's over. She probably just wants to have the baby and be done with it. Take off with her boyfriend, start a new life somewhere. We could even help them. They could disappear.'
   'And what's Home Affairs going to say? Refugee wife just ditches her kid with us and runs off, and they're not going to investigate? No, fuck that. We signed up for the full deal here, Ash. Our kid is not gonna get taken away from us just because babydaddy's back in the picture. And they're not running off and getting deported to cause all kinds of shit for us. They're just gonna have to see it through.'
   'Ten, don't be stubborn, please. Think about it. It's three years we'll have to keep this up. And what if she changes her mind? Runs away with him?'
   'No way. Forget it. This is my stand against the bullshit of artificially imposed borders and bureaucracies. And if Emmie and her pop-up babydaddy don't understand the implications, then I'm just going to have to hold her hand through it all. She's sticking it out. And she's
not going back on our agreement.'
   'But this is not a moral stand, Ten. This is our lives.'
After the horrendous day, it's a shock logging into Avalon. My enviro-friendly house and the three houses surrounding it have been replaced with loxion shelters, the tinshacks appallingly incongruous among the mansions and manicured lawns.
   I'm already on the backfoot when skyward* walks out of the corrugated door, his avatar grinning idiotically wide and extending her arms with a little twirl, like a Miss Mzansi contestant.
>> skyward*: tada! what do you think? do you like it?
>> 10: What the fuck? I didn't authorise this. u can't just hack my dwell
>> skyward*: it's a new direction. we're abandoning the subtle approach.
>> 10: It's DEFINITELY not subtle
>> skyward*: should it be? does subtlety cut it? how was your green house working out for ya?
>> 10: It's an idealisation, it's setting an example, showing people an alternative to what a perfect world might be 
>> skyward: is it enough to set a good example? how much of an impact have you really made here? and what the fuck does that matter anyway? it's not real. 
>> 10: I don't understand. I do REAL shit realworld
>> skyward: you have Struggle connections in your family, right?
   The part of me that is not still reeling from the surprise of finding my house transmogrified into shack chic is impressed that he remembers this from the conversation we had when we first met through the future*renovate site last year. But I may have overemphasised the connection. It was a second cousin by marriage whose grandmother helped shelter Ruth First, a Communist journalist blown up by a letter bomb in the 1980s. They had to scrape bits of her off the walls. Not a nice way to go.
>> 10: Yeah. And?
>> skyward*: you ask that cousin about the effectiveness of politely asking for change, of peaceful demonstrations, the total pointlessness of street theatre or civil disobedience. or democracy.
>> 10: She's dead. She died last year of a heart attack. We flew up to Port Elizabeth for the funeral.
>> skyward*: whatever. it's time to radicalise, 10. assuming you're ready for more ambitious work? but maybe i've misjudged you? based on how upset you are by such a minor adjustment? it's just a virtual house, after all.
>> 10: No, you just, you caught me by surprise. I wasn't expec
>> skyward*: best time to catch someone, wouldn't you agree? unprepared. is your protege fully recovered from his scratch, btw? 
>>10: What?
>> skyward*: your soccer boy. the one who was injured?
>> 10: Oh. Yeah. Mostly. He's taking some downtime. The meds patched him up. He spun them a story about falling off a roof, doing stunts, trying to impress a girl. 
>> skyward*: i posted the video from your friend's jacket cameras to the net, by the way. it's doing the rounds of the jam circuit. already spilling into the mainstream viral content. a colleague in new york sent it to me via her phone, didn't have the faintest idea of my involvement. she thought it was cool. >> 10: But we haven't modded it yet. You can see all our faces. That was strictly for your personal viewing.
>> skyward*: don't worry, it's all taken care of. we edited it beautifully, distorted your voices, smeared your faces. it's untraceable, trust me. we rerouted it via an anonyma server in trinidad. 
>> 10: Are you sure? Jesus
>> skyward*: it's all taken care of. 
>> 10: No, it's just. I've got a lot of shit going down right now. I mean Emmie and Home Affairs and the disconnect and trying to raise funding for Streets Back. 
>> skyward*: do what you have to do. and stop fucking around with the art project. you need money to make it happen. just take the corporate cash. 
>> 10: But
>> skyward*: what do you care? 
>> 10: It's tainted. It's against all our principles. I mean, you talk about making a real impact, what's the point if you're doing it dirty, breeding more misery? It's like terrorists dealing heroin for the cause. It's a cycle of darkness.
>> skyward*: terrorists? drugs? come now, are you saying we're on the same level? i expected more of you. what we have here is a world that is more apathetic and more violent than ever. the newscasts are so filtered to individual tastes, people only ever hear what they want to hear. and the genocide in malawi, once the model of peaceful african democracies, not only doesn't make the front page of the news sites, it barely ranks a mention. and you can't solve it by marrying a refugee. 
>> 10: Actually
>> skyward: i'm not finished. call it massscale compassion fatigue or selfish genes or the obvious conclusion capitalism has always been headed for, but the reality is people don't give a flying fuck. they've seen all the old strategies before. they're tired and worse, they're boring. and if there's one thing our culture doesn't stand for, 10, it's boredom. you know that. we have to jolt them, surprise them, it has to be spectacular. we're competing with media and advertising and promotions and pluslives, all helping people to avoid confronting reality.
>> 10: Okay, okay, I see where you're headed
>> skyward*: do you? let me put it to you this way. does anything you've done compare to what the corporates have done? 
>> 10: What do you mean?
>> skyward*: corrupting govts with their
own agendas, politicians on their payroll, exacerbating the economic gaps. building social controls and access passes and electroshock pacifiers into the very technology we need to function day to day, so you've no choice but to accept the defuser in your phone or being barred from certain parts of the city because you don't have clearance. you tell me how that compares to you hacking an adboard.
>> 10: So, we're not doing enough. 
>> skyward*: hallelujah! yes. nowhere near enough. we need to jar people from their apathy. we need spectacle. we need to fight the corporates on their own terms. Counter-exploitative. 
>> 10: Using their money.
>> skyward*: what better way to subvert them? it's not just perfect, it's beautiful. 
>> 10: I guess.
>> skyward*: you _guess_? there's no space for hedging. if you're not up for the serious work, i can find someone else. it'll take time, but you're not irreplaceable, 10. don't you want to be part of something bigger than you? 
>> 10: Yes. 
>> skyward*: yes what?
>> 10: Yes, I want to be part of something bigger. I want to rearrange the world for real. Okay? Is that fucking good enough for you? I'm totally fucking committed to whatever needs to be done. Whatever that means. All right?
>> skyward*: you see what i'm saying? trust me, 10, what we have on the horizon is going to be massive. the ripples are going to be felt globally. and we couldn't do it without you. so, what are you doing thursday night?
>> 10: Sounds like a bad pick-up line 
>> skyward*: ha. it's going to be better than sex, 10. it's going to be beautiful. the city is a communication system. we're going to be teaching it a new language.

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