The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories (11 page)

‘Who is with you?' he croaked.

‘Calm yourself, little man,' said a husky old woman's voice. ‘I have my Gideon here to keep you company is all. Hannes said you were a bit soft in the understanding. Now take us in quick, man. I only have tonight for this and I need Gideon back in two days – you remember mos, you all used to play on the dunes when you and those bliksemse kinders were small – so you must pull yourself together sommer quickly, and no long stories.' She brushed past him, followed by a half-remembered boy as tall as himself, dressed in very fussy old-style button clothing, who didn't speak.

 

He had been aware of himself lying there for some hours before he remembered about the operation. He was intermittently interested in the idea of himself lying in the dark, encrusted with blood down one side, but he kept preferring to think of the time they rolled a Joule city car down a hill of sedan bonnets and it smashed a server core to pieces. Gradually, patience exhausted, he turned his attention to the fever that was still in him, and the increasingly assertive pain in his temple. Then the feeling very suddenly entrenched itself as reality and he opened an eye into the dark. He knew immediately that Gideon was kissing him.

‘What, what man. Ge roff, go
out.
'

There was a shuffle backwards.

Then a clear voice said, ‘I'm sorry, I thought you were still gone.'

Wolkie said, ‘Fuck, man. Fuck,' and then, ‘Switch on a light, fuck.' Wolkie was suddenly aware of his body in a way that he hadn't been before. It felt like a house where everything had been stolen. His eye was clear of indicators, newsfeeds, crawls and ads.

While he scanned the tunnel for a shape that was Gideon, he put his left hand to his temple. Pressing down into fresh bandages, he heard an in-head message:
Trappblocker is: Operational. Sinhung Company DPRK
, and he let out a stray laugh which hurt instantly.

‘What were you doing? I was awake. Where is Sella? Sella, waar's jy?' he asked the tunnel.

‘She's long gone. It's me keeping you safe now, and you could be grateful at least.'

‘Well, I'm grateful for the part where you kept me alive after my op.'

‘Not as grateful as you'll be when I tell you this,' Gideon continued quickly, eager to move on from the kiss. ‘You clowns spend all your waking hours digging for trapps and selling them to us and whoever else when you don't even have to. Sella can't stop laughing about it.'

Wolkie, engrossed in the project of sitting up without passing out from the pain and dizziness of it, humoured him. ‘Oh, really? And must we go ask the Kewmsimsie for food and minutes?'

‘You earn your food one day a week. The rest of it goes on minutes. I've seen you all climb up on that old submarine, and the boys spend a whole day stitched up to Hive and that space mmog
.
Ten years living in a scrapheap, and most of it gone on minutes, and now aluminium is worth more than nothing, suddenly it's all over for you. Didn't you ever ask whether there's another way to get minutes?
What's your five-year plan?
' Gideon laughed at the catchphrase from a retro comedy and Wolkie settled down onto his back, entirely too bored and sore to respond.

Enthusiasm for the turn of the century was a city affectation that Wolkie recognised from the adverts that scrolled across the bottom of outschool – Gideon's clothes were probably from there. Whatever tent old Sella had on a dune somewhere, a corner of it was Gideon's, and probably full of quaint devices and dumbpaper posters and vintage-shop buttons and zips. Wolkie had to pause there; it was hard to be very angry with someone who wore historical dress while living with anti-capp scrap merchants who moved up and down the fucking dunes.

‘Gideon, you can tell me about it when I wake up. Just give me water, please.'

 

Wolkie lay in half-consciousness. He was determined not to fall asleep again properly until Gideon was gone and the bolt drawn to. He decided to make a show of having recovered and gingerly sat up. Gideon was reading, his eyes closed but dully glowing. ‘Yes, Gideon, now that you say so, the minutes … I did think of that every time a battery exploded while we were trying to cut a stupid little cheap trapp out of it, and every time I cut my foot or shins or arms on a chassis or a door. Those times I thought to myself, Why don't we just stop trying? Let's try hunger! Let's just totally lose it from looking at a ten-kilometre-long scrapyard all day. I thought that and then I climbed down into the old sub on the beach and just killed myself.'

Gideon's glow dimmed and he opened his eyes and he turned to Wolkie. There was a crunch of gravel and a slight rush of damp salt air as Gideon came and sat close to Wolkie and then leaned in very close. Wolkie quietly moved his hands up to under his chin. Gideon whispered, ‘Do you know about the gap in the cloud?'

Wolkie looked up at the tunnel roof, where the glint of the guide light from a bioreadout clipped to his finger was reflected on the shiny surface of the bike trailer. ‘No, I don't know what you mean, Gideon.'

‘Well, before you start, listen. You know the cloud is around everything, right? Birds, fish, balloons. You even see insects flying slow and low to the ground because they have trapps now. And you know when we have that many trapps, and all of them listening – not just to what's around them, like these old trailer trapps are listening to us, but—'

‘Yes, I fucking know, man. I'm the one lying in a tunnel asleep so that I'm out of signal range in case Sella didn't do my blocker right or the fever didn't take and I was suddenly Saldanha's most wanted. You know mos I have foetal alcohol syndrome.' Wolkie said it not without a certain pride in the full label. ‘I took different outschool, but I do actually get it.'

‘No, listen. You don't get anything. The trapps listen to whatever they're in but they also
all
listen, all of the trapps – they have another frequency. That's how the weather forecast happens and the flood forecast, billions of data points. The whole Earth listens and the servers pay attention to what it hears. And every year, trapps get smaller and they get put into more things. And you know, unless you skipped every course in outschool and I would believe it if you had, that fish and birds make their own trapps now? I mean the eggs have little trapps inside them that self-assemble and grow as they grow.'

‘The FAS kids don't do Nano, we just do the core subjects. They showed a video once about Antarctica but it was from Kewmsimsie about how well the Sadec towns there are doing.'

‘Okay, have a chocolate milk while I tell you. This is going to be more useful to you than however much outschool you did. Can you open it? Ja, okay, so all the trapps make up the mesh, right, and that is where the weather and sea report comes from? You know that video when you eat a tern – they all have trapps in – and the panda starts talking and you get that nausea that the normal crackware can't stop?'

‘Gweilo's does.'

‘Gweilo's lying, man. He just bucks up. The crackware can't stop it because all the trapps have another frequency and that's where the Wowof messages come across. You can't block them. But here's the thing: you can listen in. The encryption's rubbish. Sella has like five baby drones that we modded that can tell you ships, flood, animals, police birds, everything.'

‘So who gives a fuck. I'm blocked now. That's the point of being blocked: you can just get on with it and not be spied on by drones and trapps.'

‘You are lying in a tunnel, full of blood and stitches, and your entire job is gone. You need to start thinking, man, and you must start quickly. I am telling you how you don't need minutes, ever, ever again – you just need to be on this frequency. Because I'll tell you what's starting to show up on this frequency, Wolkie. It's everybody who's gone, everyone dead. The mesh is billions of ears now, down to mosquitos and termites. They are finally picking up the softest voices. I heard it. You can listen to it now if you want. Come close to my ear.'

‘No, man. Listen, I am actually going to be fine. You can leave me now, I'm going to get up tonight and walk back to Aluminium 1 and find the guys. Thanks for the story.'

‘Okay, mister,' Gideon replied in a quieter, but steely, voice. ‘But Sella said I must just give you a last injection to get that skin to close up properly. It's going to put you out, but don't worry, I'll still be here when you come back.'

 

Hannes laid a tarpaulin over the silver boxes of chocolate milk.

‘Mans! Make sure you put all these in after Gweilo is finished with the saw,' he yelled at Mansoor, who was stacking electrolysis units into the
SAS Assegaai
's tiny submersible. Out in the bay, ships were filled with steel for Antarctic smelters and the boys had rowed out to one of them and attached a two-kilometre cable. Thousands of units had been sold over the years to kit out the museum submarine's escape pod with rebreathers and electrolysis apps to a standard that made Hannes and Gweilo and Mansoor confident, especially when all three were together, that they would make it to Queen Maud Land alive, that the pod would hold, that the ship wouldn't cut them loose if they were discovered. But when any two of the boys were alone, they found ways not to mention the plan or its chances.

 

Gideon was shouting now, and gesturing in the dark from excitement.

‘You see now, Outschool? And they tried and they are trying to cover it up, but they never had a hope. It's just about frequency, it's just about listening really quiet and listening long. We could do it here.'

‘And then what?'

‘What the cloud hears is cancelled people, man. Dead people show up on the trapps, a few bytes here and a few off a satellite on the other side of the planet, and a few months later from a trapp inside a marker bird flying to Antarctica. But it adds up; the server can't stop matching it up like it does with everything else and what it matches up is talk from dead people.'

‘And what do they say? And who are they talking to?' answered Wolkie, tolerantly.

‘They play the fucken social games, for one thing. That was the first proof – more members on Second Life than its government had citizens, that sort of thing. They looked into that very carefully, looking for fraud and that, and when they couldn't find any, it was basically official. On the
i
they show up and talk about anything, man, because they are in the cloud. They were lying there being leftover energy, sort of, but the cloud got over the whole earth, bigger and bigger and the mesh had to get thinner and finer so it could read insects and plants and it started picking up these guys. They show up now. And they do what they want. You can find them if you look. They are slow: It takes weeks to hear a full answer out of them.'

Wolkie knew that Gideon would have to be kept amenable to his own full recovery and survival for a full day yet. He agreed to everything. He asked easy, encouraging questions. Gideon grew in enthusiasm, and didn't kiss him again when they both watched a long Terre Adélie war film.

 

Gideon was shaking him.

‘C'mon, I'm going to show you.'

‘Man, listen, piss off. I've got a gash in my head and I'm sleeping.'

‘Grow up and come to the beach and see how you don't need to buy another minute of
i
in your life.'

The dunes were silver and the sea a complicated set of blues and blacks with a clear moon-coloured causeway seeming to run the length of it to Antarctica. It smelled of salt and seaweed more than oxidised metal, and the Kewmsimsie hills and kloofs looked small and blue and somehow majestic at that distance. Wolkie was, for a moment, proud to be from there. Distantly, in the outer bay, were more ships than he had ever seen at once. It looked like he had been right about the aluminium price. Gideon had disappeared, but he called and Wolkie turned to see him carrying a flapping seagull.

‘Take this trapp, okay? Now hold it to your temple. Okay, if that's not working, put it in your mouth like this. Yes, okay. Now follow the instructions. Okay? Okay, you're twinned; you with it now. Okay, now hold the bird's neck and let's make a small slice there, just under the skin really … Hold it tight, man. And we put it in – I really need you to
hold it tight
– and we close it with this skinclip. Okay, now just wait.'

The bird took a few steps, cawing loudly, and flapped a few times before flying off. Immediately Wolkie heard a low hiss.

‘What was that trapp? What is the point of this?'

‘That bird's flying to where they all go at night, across the bay. Now, wait for it get far away, and listen.'

The two boys sat down. Wolkie was tired of Gideon and wondered if he was fourteen yet and if being outdoors meant that the block had taken and that he could leave and find the boys. He might not have quota, but he had decided before that ten years of living together as one in Kewmsimsie was not nothing. The boys were probably at the Volvo hill now, sorting out the big cache of trapps and making sure each one got his share. The bird couldn't be seen anymore and the hiss from the trapp was getting soft.

Then Wolkie heard them. Snatches of words, then static, then moans.

Gideon saw his eyes widen. ‘Have you got
i
still? Come, man, turn on your interpreter.'

Can't believe
static
the damage
static
at least fifty ships and their effluent
static. ‘This is just radio, Gideon. And I'm going home. After it took me eight years to pay your lot off for my capp, I'm not going to be sold another little piece of your North Korean shit.'

‘If it's radio, how are you picking it up from a tracker app inside a
bird
?'

‘From
i.
'

‘You don't have any
i.
You got uploaded during the fever. Your block took. Check your About Me'.