Slipping

by Lauren Beukes

  Dirk smacks the back of my hand. “Now, now, don’t interfere.” He pops the cigarette lighter, and smirks. “Or I’ll have to burn you.”

  “So, let’s say we go for a little ride.”

  “No! Wait! Please!”

  “Just kidding,” Dirk says, lighting up a cigarette instead.

  “Don’t! Joshua, I mean it. Don’t you dare!”

  “You ever thought about it?” Dirk says, offering me the pack with one hand. “You’ve got the look. And the mouth. Although you gotta stop using so many long words. You could do it, though. Have your own show, I mean.”

  “Noooooo!”

  Inside, the gun goes off with a bang and a flash that lights up the interior and Koketla’s horrified face, her eyes scrunched-up, her body desperately twisting away. And I’m in shock and this is how I will later justify my thought at the time—that this is not one of her better-looking moments.

  “So, kid.” Dirk leans over to turn down the volume on the screaming from the back, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “What do you say?”

  The Pinocchios are starting to rot. Really, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. They’re just doing what corpses do best. Even artificially preserved and florally animated ones. Even the ones you know.

  They shuffle around the corridors of our homelab in their hermetically sealed hazmat suits, using whatever’s left of their fine motor functioning. Mainly they get in the way. We’ve learned to walk around them when they get stuck. You can get used to anything. But I avoid looking at their faces behind the glass. I don’t want to recognize Rousseau.

  They’re supposed to be confined to one of the specimen storage units. But a month ago, a Pinocchio pulled down a cabinet of freeze-dried specimens. So now Inatec management lets them wander around. They seem happier free-range. If you can say that about a corpse jerked around by alien slime-mould like a zombie puppet.

  They’ve become part of the scenery. Less than ghosts. They’re as banal a part of life on this dog-forsaken planet as the nutritionally fortified lab-grown oats they serve up in the cafeteria three times a day.

  We’re supposed to keep out of their way. “No harvester should touch, obstruct or otherwise interfere with the OPPs,” the notice from Inatec management read, finished off with a smiley face and posted on the bulletin board in the cafeteria. On paper, because we’re not allowed personal communications technology in homelab. Too much of a security risk.

  Organically Preserved Personnel. It’s an experimental technique to use the indigenous flora to maintain soldiers’ bodies in wartime to get them back to their loved ones intact. The irony is that we’re so busy doing experiments on the corpses of our deceased crew that we don’t send them back at all. And if we did, it would have to be in a flask. Because after they rot—average “life-span” is twenty-nine days—they liquefy. And the slime-mould has to be reintegrated into the colony they’ve been growing in lab three.

  It’s not really slime-mould, of course. Nothing on this damn planet is anything you’d recognize, which is exactly why Inatec has us working the jungle in armored suits along with four thousand other corporates planet-side, all scrambling to find new alien flora with commercial applications so they can patent the shit out of all of it.

  “Slime-mould” is the closest equivalent the labtechs have come up with. Self-organizing cellular amoebites that ooze around on their own until one of them finds a very recently dead thing to grow on. Then it lays down signals, chemical or hormonal or some other system we don’t understand yet, and all the other amoebites congeal together to form a colony that sets down deep roots like a wart into whatever’s left of the nervous system of the animal . . . and then take it over.

  We’ve had several military contractors express major interest in seeing the results. Inatec has promised us all big bonuses if we manage to land a military deal—and not just the labtechs either. After all, it’s us lowly harvesters who go out there in our GMP suits to find the stuff.

  Inatec’s got mining rights to six territories in four quadrants on this world. Two subtropical, one arid/mountainous and three tropical, which is where the big bucks are. Officially, we’re working RCZ-8 Tropical 14: 27° 32’ S / 49° 38’ W. We call it The Green.

  We were green ourselves when we arrived on-planet. The worst kind of naïve, know-nothing city hicks. It was all anyone could talk about as we crammed around the windows—how fucking amazing it all looked as the dropship descended over our quadrant. We weren’t used to nature. We didn’t know how hungry it was.

  The sky was rippled in oranges and golds from the pollen in the air, turning the spike slate pinnacles of the mountains a powder pink. The jungle was a million shades of green. Greens like you couldn’t imagine. Greens to make you mad. Or kill you dead.

  Homelab squats in the middle of all that green like a fat concrete spider with too many legs radiating outwards. Uglier even than the Caxton Projects apartment blocks back home. Most of us are from what you’d call underprivileged backgrounds. The Caxton stats when I left were 89% adult unemployment, 73% adult illiteracy, 65% chance of dying before the age of forty due to communicable disease or an act of violence. Who wouldn’t want a ticket out of there? Even if it was one-way.

  Besides, our work is a privilege. We’re getting to work at the forefront of xenoflora biotech. At least that’s what it says on the “Welcome to Inatec” pack all employees are handed when they’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on the contract. Or maybe just made an X where you’re supposed to sign. You don’t need to be literate to pick flowers. Even in a GMP.

  Of course, by forefront, they mean front lines. And by harvesting they mean strip-mining. Except everything we strip away grows back, faster than we can keep up. Whole new species we’ve never seen before spring up overnight. Whole new ways to die.

  You got to suffer for progress, baby, Rousseau would have said (if he was still alive). And boy, do we suffer out there.

  The first thing they do when you land is strip you, shave you, put you through the ultraviolet sterilizer, and then surgically remove your finger- and toenails. It’s a biologically sensitive operation. You can’t be bringing in contaminants from other worlds. And there was that microscopic snail parasite incident that killed off two full crews before the labtechs figured it out. That’s why we don’t have those ultra-sensitive contact pads on our gloves anymore, even though it makes harvesting harder. Because the snail would burrow right through them and get under the cuticle, working its way through your body to lay its eggs in your lungs. When the larvae hatch, they eat their way out, which doesn’t kill you, it just gives you a nasty case of terminal snail-induced emphysema. It took the infected weeks to die, hacking up bloody chunks of their lungs writhing with larvae.

  Diamond miners used to stick gems up their arses to get them past security. With flora, you can get enough genetic material to sell to a rival with a fingernail scraping. “Do we have any proof there was ever a snail infestation?” Ro would ask over breakfast. “Apart from the company newsletter?” he’d add, before practical, feisty, educated Lurie could get a word in and contradict him. He was big into his conspiracy theories and our medtech, Shapshak, only encouraged him. They’d huddle deep into the night, getting all serious over gin made from nutri-oats that Hoffmann used to distill in secret in his room. It seemed to make Shapshak more gloomy than ever, but Ro bounced back from it invigorated and extra-jokey.

  Ro was the only one who could get away with calling me Coco, and only because we were sleeping together. Dumbfuck name, I know. Coco Yengko. Mom wanted me to be a model. Or a ballerina. Or a movie star. All those careers that get you out of the ghettosprawl. Shouldn’t have had an ugly kid, then, Ma. Shouldn’t have been poor. Shouldn’t have let the Inatec recruiter into our apartment. And hey, while we’re at it, Ro shouldn’t have died.

  Fucking Green.

  Green is the wrong word for it. You’d only make that mistake from the outside. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s b
lack. The tangle of the canopy blocks out the sunlight. It’s the murky gloom after twilight, before real dark sets in. Visibility is five meters, fifteen with headlights, although the light attracts moths, which get into the vents. Pollen spores swirl around you, big as your head. Sulfur candy floss. And everything is moist and sticky and fecund. Like the whole jungle is rutting around us.

  The humidity smacks you, even through the suit, thick as +8 gravity, so that you’re slick as a greased ratpig with sweat the moment you step out. It pools in your jockstrap, chafes when you walk, until it forms blisters big as testicles. (A new experience for the girls on the crew.) Although walking’s not what we do. More like wading against a sucking tide of heat and flora.

  The rotting mulch suffocates our big, clanking mechanical footsteps. Some of the harvesters play music on their private channels. Ro used to play opera, loud, letting it spill into The Green, until it started attracting insects the size of my head. I put a stop to it after that. I prefer to listen to the servo motors grinding in protest. I have this fantasy that I’ll be able to hear it when my suit gets compromised. The shhht of air that lets through a flood of spores like fibrous threads that burrow into metal and flesh. The faint suck of algae congealing on the plastic surfaces, seeping into the seams of the electronics, corroding the boards so the nanoconnections can’t fire. The hum of plankton slipping between the joints of my GMP between the spine and pelvic plates, to bite and sting.

  The base model GMPs aren’t built for these conditions. The heat is a problem. The servo motors get clogged. The armor corrodes. The nanotronics can’t sustain. Every joint is a weak point. The damn flora develops immunity to every vegicide we try. Assuming they’re actually using vegicides, Ro would point out. Why risk the harvest when harvesters are replaceable?

  Management has determined that the optimum number for a harvesting team is five. I’m the team leader. Look, Ma, leadership material. Our medtech is Shapshak, who sometimes slips me amphetamines, which he gets under the counter from the labtechs along with other pharmaceuticals he doesn’t share. (It’s not like management don’t know. They’re happy if we’re productive and sometimes you need a little extra something to get through out there.) Lurie is our am-bot; a high school education and eight weeks of training in amateur botany specimen collection puts her a full pay scale above the rest of us plebs, plus she gets the most sophisticated suit—a TCD with neuro-feedback tentacle fingers built into the hands for snagging delicate samples that aren’t susceptible to snail invasion. Rousseau and Waverley were our clearers—manual labor, their GMPs suitably equipped with bayonet progsaws that’ll cut through rock, thermo-machetes for underbrush, and extra armor plating for bludgeoning your way through the jungle with brute force when everything else failed.

  In retrospect, we could have done with less brute force. Could have done with me spotting the damn stingstrings before we blundered into the middle of a migration. Could have done with being less wired on the under-the-counter stuff. One minute Waverley and Ro are plowing through dense foliage ahead, the next, there are a thousand mucusy tendrils unfurling from the canopy above us.

  This wouldn’t have been a problem usually. Sure, the venom might corrode your paintwork, leave some ugly pockmarks that’ll get the maintenance guys all worked up, but they’re not hectic enough to compromise a GMP.

  Unless, say, someone panics and trips and topples forward, accidentally ripping a hole in Rousseau’s suit with the razor edge of a machete, half-severing his arm. Waverley swore blind it wasn’t his fault. He tripped. But GMPs have balance/pace adjustors built-in. You have to be pretty damn incompetent to fall over in one. If Ro wasn’t a roaming brain-dead corpse-puppet right now, he might be suspicious, might think it was a conspiracy to recruit more guinea pigs for the OPP program. We know better. We know Waverley’s just a fucking moron.

  There was a lot of screaming. Mainly from Ro, until Shapshak shot him up with morphine, but also Lurie threatening to kill Waverley for being so damn stupid. It took us ninety minutes to get back to homelab, me and Shapshak dragging Ro on the portable stretcher from his field kit, which is only really useful for transporting people—not armored suits—but it was too dangerous to take him out. Waverley broke through the undergrowth ahead of us—the only place where we would trust him, leaving traces of Ro’s blood painted across broken branches.

  When we got to homelab, Lurie still had to file the specimens and we all had to go through decontam, no matter how much I swore at security over the intercom: Just let us back in right fucking now.

  We had to sit in the cafeteria, the only communal space, listening to Rousseau die, pretending not to. It should have been easy. The loud drone of the air conditioner and the filters and the sterilizer systems all fighting The Green is the first thing you acclimatize to here. But Ro’s voice somehow broke through, a shrill shriek between clenched teeth. We hadn’t known anyone who’d ever died from the stingstrings. The labtechs must have been thrilled.

  Shapshak spooned oats into his face, drifting away from it all on some drug he wasn’t sharing. Lurie couldn’t touch her food. She put on her old-school security-approved headphones, bopped her head fiercely to the music. Made like she wasn’t crying. I restrained myself from hitting Waverley, who kept whining, “It wasn’t my fault, okay?” I took deep breaths against the urge to bash his big bald head on the steel table until his brains oozed out. If Ro was here and not lying twisting around on a gurney while the meds prepared the killing dose of morphephedrine, he would have cracked the tension with a joke. About crappy last meals maybe.

  The other crews were making bets on what would kill him. Marking up the odds on the back of a cigarette packet. Black humor and wise-cracking is just how you deal. We’d have been doing the same if it wasn’t one of ours. Yellow Choke 3:1. Threadworms 12:7. The Tars 15:4. New & Horrible: 1:2.

  Ro’s voice changed in pitch, from scream-your-throat-raw to a low groaning—the kind that comes from your intestines plasticinating. The spores must have got in to the rip in his gut through the tear in his armor.

  OhgodohgodohgodeuggghgodOHpleasefuckgodOH

  Across from us, Hoffmann from F-Crew leapt to his feet, whooping in delight and making gimme gestures. “Tars! I fucking knew it! Oh yeah! Hand over the cashmoney, baby!”

  Ro’s screaming tapered off. Which meant either he was dead or just sub-auditory under the concert of laboring machinery. Waverley tried to say something encouraging, “At least we know it’s the fast kind of fatal,” and I punched him in the face, knocking the porridge out of his mouth in a grey splatter tinged with blood—along with two teeth.

  I got a warning, but no demerit, “under the circumstances,” human resources said. They declined my request to have Waverley reassigned to another unit.

  “It’s for the best,” they said. Which was the same line my mom spun me when she took me to the sterilization clinic in Caxton, mainly for the incentive kickback the government provided, but also to make sure I didn’t end up like her, pregnant and homeless at fourteen, working double shifts at the seam factory—which is what she did after I was born, to keep the pair of us alive. That only makes me feel more guilty—all the sacrifices she made so I could get out of Caxton. And here I am, letting my sometime-lover die on my watch. Sorry, Ma, I think. But you don’t know what it’s like out here.

  Within forty-eight hours, Ro’s replacement arrived. Joseph Mukuku. Another ghettosprawl kid sprayed, shaved, irradiated, de-nailed and ready to go. We had three whole days to mourn while he ran through the simconditioning and then we were back out there in the thick of it, harvesting. I found a request for stingstrings in my order log. The results of Ro’s venom burns were, according to the labtechs, “fascinating.” The note attached to the order read: “Lash-wounds were cauterized. Unclear whether this is common to stingstrings or whether it was reacting with other flora or spores. Living specimens (ideal) required for further study. Deceased specimens okay.”

  We couldn’t get them. Tha
t’s what I reported anyway. Threatened to peel the skin off Mukuku if he said different. The kid learned quick, didn’t cause any shit and we made Waverley walk five meters up front where he’d only take out flora if he tripped again. Shapshak offered me chemical assistance from his stash of pharmaceuticals, but by then I was already contemplating it and I knew drugs would only get in the way. I didn’t want to get better. I wanted out.

  It was the encounter with Rousseau that cemented it.

  I’d managed to avoid him for twelve whole days after he died. Every time I spotted a Pinocchio shuffling down the corridor or standing spookily motionless facing a wall, I did a 180 in the other direction. Didn’t make a big deal about it, just managed to spend more time in the gym or doing routine maintenance on my GMP. Anything to keep busy. It’s the thinking about it that kills me. I try to leave no space for thinking.

  I was doing leg-presses when he found me. It was the automatic door that tipped me off. It kept opening and closing, opening and closing, like someone didn’t have enough brains to get out of the way of the sensors. I knew it was him even before I saw the limp, sagging sleeve where his left arm should have been.

  “What do you want?” I said, standing up and moving over to rest my hand casually on the 10kg barbells. Ready to club him to death. Re-death. Whatever. Not expecting an answer.

  Through the faceplate, I could see a caul of teeming, squirming green over his face. You could still make out his features, still tell it was Ro under there. I thought about his cells starting to break down under his new slime-mould skin, his organs collapsing, nerves firing sluggishly through sagging connections in dead tissue.

  He opened his mouth, his tongue flopping uselessly inside. He worked his jaw mechanically. Individual amoebites, attracted by the motion, started sliding into the cavity, triggering others, oozing past his lips—coating his teeth, his tongue, with the seething furry growth. Inside the suit, Ro tipped his head back, his mouth open in something like a scream as more and more amoebites flooded in to colonize his mouth, soft furry spores spilling down his chin. “Misfiring neurons,” human resources had assured us when they first let the Pinocchios out.