Moxyland

by Lauren Beukes

  'Pump your fist for me, please.'

  'What happens to the dogs afterwards?'

  'They put them out to pasture.'

  'So you can't adopt? Or use them as guide dogs or something?'

  'I've never heard of–'

  'Impossible,' says the doctor. 'It's our intellectual property. It's very closely guarded. They put the dogs down.' She sees my face. 'But don't worry, they don't feel anything. Just a prick. Then it's over.'

  She positions the needle against the crook of my elbow. 'Make a fist for me.' Normally, I look away, even though I don't mind needles so much, but this time I'm watching as the slim metal head bites into my skin.

  She pulls back the plunger a fraction, so that blood swirls into the chamber, like ink in water.

  I look up and see that she is watching me intently. 'See,' she says, 'just a little prick.'

  Still holding my gaze, she pushes the plunger all the way in.

  The world tilts to the right, and then everything swarms up to meet me in a surge of claustrophobia. Suddenly I'm scared. I struggle up through the tightening darkness, sealing in on me, like the crush of water.

  'Don't fight it.'

  My eyelids flutter, letting in snatches of light like a strobe, snapshots of movement. Dr. Precious pushes my shoulders, holding me down. Andile's mouth twitches. He looks away. I can't keep my eyes open. I can't move my arms. I try and push up, through the dark, which is wide open, too open, so I'm drowning in it, fighting.

  Then calm.

  It's just like diving.

  Following the bubbles up, knowing that soon I'll break the surface.

  Toby

  When do I finally tweak what's happening? Not when he snatches my wrist, so tight I can feel it bruise. Not when he starts shaking violently or when his eyes roll back and his jaw clamps and he starts making hideous sounds through his teeth, wet, viscous shrieks.

  No, kids, the indicator for yours truly that this is some serious fucking shit is when he starts bleeding from every exit point. At first I laugh, cos I can't help it. Because it's so overboard gruesome, total B-grade horror, and so badly done, it starts oozing out in thick dark runnels, and then it's pouring out, gushing, and I try to pull my hand away, and he won't fucking let go. It's like someone turned on a liquidiser inside him. And I cannot get him to let go.

  'Tendeka,' I shake his shoulder, but he just continues dissolving onto the rooftop. It's soaking into my shoes. The hem of my BabyStrange is dipped in the mess ebbing out from under him. Jesus. I'm frantic to get away from it. I'm wrenching his fingers. Bending them back. Gagging. And then he squeezes once more, convulsive, and lets go.

  I tumble backwards, clutching my wrist, and fall in the blood, the soles of my tackies squeaking in it, so I leave tracks and a handprint. And now I do vomit, kneeling in Tendeka's insides. When my stomach stops contracting and there's nothing left except spit, I look down and see this muck mixing with his blood, and I try and brush it away, scoop it up with my hands, so it doesn't, because I can't handle this, can't handle him pooled around me, can't handle how I've violated his remains. Please. Jesus. Motherfuck.

  'C'mon Tendeka.' I'm whispering, rocking on my heels, forwards and back. I want to shake him, scream at him, even though I know it's pointless, that he's not teasing. That it's not some hoax, a bluff. I can't touch him. And oh Jesus motherfuck, if it's not a hoax, how long do I have? I can't. Not like. Jesus. I can't even look.

  I fall onto my knees again, dry-heaving some more, my hands over my mouth so I don't do it again, and somewhere the heaving turns into sobbing.

  The coat. The coat. The fucking coat. I check the playback. But there's nothing. Static. Blur. White noise. I rewind, fast forward and there! It's bad quality, but it's there underneath the fritz. 'Human rights violation–' and my snarky comment, overlapping.

  Oh fuck, Tendeka. Fuck. I'm sorry. Maybe it can be cleaned up. If I can get it to, I dunno, someone, upload it to some geek site, let them clean it up. And get to a clinic. Get the vaccine. Turn myself in. How long do I have?

  I look up for helicopters. But it wasn't casting. I'm okay. They're not looking for us yet. I hit save. I sprint down the stairs. I don't look back.

  And it's only when I'm back in my apartment, with the door double-locked and the fridge up against it, already uploading the files to my machine, not that it's gonna do me much good with my connection down, that I notice my wrist is glowing green, a pale jellyfish phosphorescence shining through. I switch the channel on my screen to mirror, and stare at my face. I look incredibly healthy. I close my eyes, probe how I'm feeling. Freaked. Definitely. But not sick.

  It gets worse. Tendeka's on every channel on the TV, his face dominating the screen, Osama, coupled with some kid, Zuko Sephuma, who's already been arrested.

  My first thought is how much shit I'm in. How I need to just set fire to my entire apartment and all the evidence and walk away, disappear. What flammables do I have at handy?

  Or.

  Or I have the total sony exclusive on the untimely and grotesque death of a terrorist.

  Or a martyr. Depends on who's paying.

  I can't stick around here, though. They've already been here once. And they're sure to notice Tendeka's corpse on the roof. Hard to miss with all the splatter.

  I stuff the coat, spare clothes and my laptop – and fuckit, the VIM, cos wherever I'm going, I'll still need a clean-up – into my bag.

  I step out of the door into a whole new bright world, feeling exhausted and exhilarated.

  And thirsty.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing may happen in isolation, but books don't. I'd like to thank a long list of people who helped make Moxyland what it is, from its original South African incarnation to its assimilation into the Robot Army.

  Thanks to Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris at Angry Robot for their boundless and bounding enthusiasm and easy-going candour – and my agent, Ron Irwin, for getting the book into their hands.

  The University of Cape Town's MA in Creative Writing programme gave me the creative space to start the book and a grant from South Africa's National Arts Council gave me the financial freedom to finish it. Thanks especially to André Brink, Stephen Watson, Ron Irwin and Jenefer Shute.

  Maggie Davey, the publishing director at Jacana read the manuscript on the plane to the Frankfurt Book Fair and by the time she'd landed had decided to give Moxyland its first home. Jacana's Russell Martin, Bridget Impey, Emily Amos and especially Pete van der Woude (most passionate punter of books and deft ringmaster of book launches) helped make it a critical success in South Africa.

  Sam Wilson, Sarah Lotz, Matthew Brown, Tinarie van Wyk Loots, Alex van Tonder, Lindiwe Nkutha, Padraic O Meara and Wynand 'Munki' Groenewald were the first readers who helped panel beat the early drafts with their feedback.

  I owe much to Helen Moffett, my brilliant luddite editor for midwifing this unwieldy bastard, and Dale Halvorsen, aka Joey Hi-fi, the most inventive cover designer a girl could ask for (twice).

  My family and friends provided love and support, both fiscal and psychological.

  And lastly to my husband and best friend, Matthew, thank you for everything (most especially our daughter).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lauren Beukes is a writer, TV scriptwriter and recovering journalist (although she occasionally falls off the wagon).

  She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town under André Brink, but she got her real education in ten years of freelance journalism, learning really useful skills like how to pole-dance and make traditional sorghum beer. For the sake of a story, she's jumped out of planes and into shark-infested waters, and got to hang out with teen vampires, township vigilantes, AIDS activists and homeless sex workers among other interesting folk. She lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter. Her next novel for Angry Robot will be the (very) urban fantasy Zoo City.

  www.moxyland.com

  Extras…

  Moxyland's Stem Ce
lls

  Moxyland was inspired by a DNA remix of many influences, from BoingBoing to Stephen Johnson's Emergence to Theo Jansen's incredible evolving mechanical Strandbeests. It riffs off surveillance society and the Great Firewall of China, bird flu and the threat of terrorism, the cult of kawaii, RFID chips in passports, virtual rape and refugee camps in Second Life, and reallife murder over a virtual sword in China.

  It developed from 12 years of working as a journalist, from stories I worked on for Colors magazine where I spent many weeks in Cape Town's townships with photographers Marc Shoul and Pieter Hugo, interviewing electricity cable thieves, paramilitary vigilantes and people dying of the twin pandemic of TB and AIDS and learning how to make smileys or boiled sheep heads.

  Of course, it also grew out of the legacy of apartheid: the arbitrary and artificially applied divides between people, the pass system and the insidious Special Branch – a secret police operation to rival the Stasi that infiltrated activist organisations, used wet bag torture to extract 'confessions', threw troublemakers out of fifth storey windows or blew them up with letterbombs and plotted chemical warfare and sinister bio-experiments. Don't let anyone tell you that apartheid has nothing to do with South Africa now. Those roots run deep and tangled and we'll be tripping over them for many generations to come.

  But really, the stem cell that developed into Moxyland was Lucky Strike. Or, rather, the hush-hush underground parties British American Tobacco organised for their brands when the South African government outlawed cigarette advertising in 2000.

  They seduced hip young things to be brand ambassadors for the price of free cigarettes. They staged provocative theatre at bars and restaurants like a faked strip poker game with models. And they dropped millions on the most outrageous events, from Peter Stuyvesant's swanky mansion pool parties to Lucky Strike's private concerts, flying out international rock acts and house DJs for one night only. The height of the debauchery was a million Rand party train with multiple dancefloors and five different bars, snaking through the Cape winelands on its way to a secret destination for a luxury picnic. If you'd missed the ARG-style clues, subtly disguised in a Lucky Strike target with only a phone number stuck up at the back of a bar, you missed out.

  I wrote a story on it for The Big Issue and then transmuted it into fiction with a short story called 'Branded', about a girl who turns sponsorbaby for a soft drink company with a dubious agenda. It blossomed like a tumour from there, mutating into interesting directions I hadn't anticipated – and a full-blown novel four years later.

  It's been fascinating to see real-world correlations develop since the novel made its debut in South Africa in 2008. Some of them are strange and wonderful, others are deeply worrying to me. And the best of it is stuff I couldn't have invented.

  In the last year, for example, Portugal has launched wave power generators, cell phone wallets have been rolled out and there's now proof, after all, that subliminal advertising can work, if paired with some kind of reinforcing reward – which might well include feel-good neural feedback in the future.

  South Africa's national energy provider, Eskom, has announced its intentions to open up its own proprietary university (not, as yet linked to an AIDS orphanage); a Seoul National University team created the first transgenic dogs that glow in the dark thanks to the addition of an anemone gene; and the Pentagon put out a brief for military contractors to develop a 'multirobot pursuit system', ie, packs of robots that could 'search for and detect a non-cooperative human'.

  There was a real bio-engineered artwork that caused a controversy in 2008 when it was exhibited and then 'killed' at MoMa in New York. 'Victimless Leather' was a small living jacket made up of embryonic mouse stem cells, but it grew out of control, clogged up its incubation system and had to be 'put down', to the apparent distress of the curator – all of which, purely coincidentally I'm sure, generated a whole lot of headlines.

  But the scariest synchronicity with Moxyland was something an electrical engineer friend told me – that a cop buddy had idly asked him over a beer if there was any way to SMS an electric shock to a fleeing suspect's cell phone, you know, because it's a pain in the ass to chase them wearing a heavy bulletproof vest. Luckily, my friend says that even for the purposes of bar talk, it's an impractical idea, especially without buy-in from the cell phone companies and government. Impractical. But not impossible.

  The thing is that it's all possible, especially if we're willing to trade away our rights for convenience, for the illusion of security. Our very own bright and shiny dystopia is only ever one totalitarian government away.

  Further reading

  Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings that exposed some, but not all of the atrocities committed under apartheid.

  Jonny Steinberg's Thin Blue and Andrew Brown's Street Blues about the harrowing challenges of police work in South Africa.

  The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Jaoa Silva – the true story of the four news photographers who risked their lives during apartheid. (Kendra would have loved these guys.)

  Fiction

  A Dry White Season by André Brink Black Petals by Bryan Rostron

  LB, Cape Town

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