Slipping

by Lauren Beukes

  But I still have to do something about that fucking cat. Oh, I put out those scientifically formulated maximum-nutrition vitamin-fortified pellets you feed the little fucker, but he’s been steadfastly refusing to eat. I can’t fuckging HSAndle it. I can’t.

  I was tempted to take some keepsake of you, to save it from the house, but there’s nothing I really want. I did try to take one last photograph of us together but your flash is broken, so I don’t know if it’ll come out.

  Anyway, sweetheart, it’s getting late. You know part of me will always love you. I don’t regret anything we had, anything that happened. But I think all this has showed me that I’m ready to move on. I think I’m going to be okay.

  Love (always)

  Claudia

  July 29, 2017

  Special Report by correspondent Lauren Beukes

  [Cape Town] The view from the Mongooses’ offices at an undisclosed location on the Cape Town Foreshore overlooks white-sailed yachts on a choppy grey sea and the distant industry of shipping containers being shuffled around by cranes and trucks in the harbor. On the other side, the bustle of the city bowl is reduced to the blank façades of buildings, the faint hum of traffic. It’s an enviable view for a government department. It’s a pity no one’s taking it in.

  That’s because the Mongoose team, some forty-eight of them, are glued to their screens. A mix of programmers and “intelligence collectors,” the elite surveillance unit is watching the greatest show on earth. You.

  “It’s actually very tedious,” Lerato Makhetha says, looking over my shoulder at the information scrolling across the screen. The Mongooses’ thirty-six-year-old director of operations is barely five foot two with close-cropped natural hair, a petite Big Brother in heels and a Maya Prass dress. It would be easy to underestimate her. Also a mistake.

  The info stream is harvested from cellular phone calls, social media, CCTV, cookies, browser histories and even embedded fashion catwalk cams, all feeding information straight into the Mongooses’ servers.

  “We’ve got algorithms in place to do the heavy lifting: detecting blatant abuse, unauthorized disclosures on flagged materials, problem phrases, links to and from blacklisted sites, criminal activities, scams, illegal pornography and so on. But at the end of the day, you still need a human being to sort through it all. Is this a real terrorist threat to national security or just someone blowing off steam on a blog?”

  The work may be all about the subtleties, but Makhetha is not. Formed from the remains of the Hawks after they were disbanded, the Mongooses’ mandate is, she explains, really simple: “To bite the heads off snakes in the grass and chew up the dirty little beetles trying to turn up shit and undermine our democracy.”

  “Relax,” she says, brushing off my obvious discomfort with a laugh. “It’s all in line with the Constitution. We’re not the Gestapo here.”

  The truth is that they’re more effective. In the age of social networking, sharing is caring and secret policing was never this easy. Whereas apartheid’s Special Branch would have had to embed undercover agents to spy on union meetings, for the Mongooses, total transparency, at least for private citizens, is only one click away. A glance at Facebook events, your Flickr set, your Twitter feed or your Mxit friends list provides information on your known associates, recent whereabouts, political, social and sexual proclivities.

  But the combination of RICA, which makes every SIM card traceable down to its GPS coordinates, the Protection of Information Act and the Corporate Responsibility Act of 2013 (CRA), which legally obliges corporations to cooperate with government demands such as shutting down cellphone coverage in a riot zone, for example, makes their job a whole lot easier. The Mongooses can not only monitor open networks but private ones too, including phone calls, emails and your Internet history. They can even track your current location using your cellphone’s GPS—and they can shut down anything they don’t like.

  There are rumors that the unit also has a game design arm that creates silly apps for social networking, that rate your sex appeal on MeToo, for example, or create photoclouds out of your most popular Tumblr posts. But when I ask her about it, Makhetha says mildly, “That’s classified.”

  Also classified is exactly what happens when a human operator confirms the algorithms. Makhetha won’t comment on the rumors of secret detainments. “That’s not strictly my department,” she says, “If something like that was happening, it would be classified, but I can tell you, at least in theory, what the first steps in the procedure would be from our side.

  “If it’s just someone venting or making a stupid joke about blowing up the taxi rank because the drivers are on strike, we’ll send them a friendly warning to cut it out. But if it’s a genuine offense, say an info terrorist disseminating top secret documents about a government tender, we’re within rights to act immediately, to disconnect them from the Internet and shut down their cellphone account until the matter is resolved in a court of law.

  “We’ve got all this in place with the network providers as per the CRA. Of course the perpetrators still get a free and fair trial, but we have to shut down their communications immediately. It’s about stopping the poison before it infects the whole system. I guess you could say we act as freedom’s tourniquet.”

  The problem, according to critics, is that the tourniquet is not just cutting off the poison, but the circulation of a healthy democracy. One of the most outspoken detractors is Montle Hunter, head of Clear, a radicalized pro-transparency spin-off of Afrileaks, which the Mongooses shut down two years ago.

  Clear calls the Mongooses “the dream patrol”—as in that’s the only place they’re not watching your every move (you hope). It’s appropriate then that the only place Hunter agrees to meet with me is in a dream world of sorts—in the popular Filipino virtual gameworld, ShinyShiny.

  Hunter appears as a bog-standard cyborg-orc, indiscernible from any of the other orcs wandering through the enchanted techno-forests of ShinyShiny. “This is me,” he jokes. “Warts and all.”

  The truth is that no one knows what he looks like, or if Montle Hunter is his real name, or if he’s a he at all, or only one person or the public face of a interchangeable like-minded collective of people. Hunter operates between the unregulated alternanets and darknets to avoid detection by Mongooses or the global info-terrorism unit, Int.pol.

  When he goes out in public, he says, he has visual frequency distorters on hand to disrupt CCTV cameras. Meanwhile, Clear agents have fallen back on using old-school spy techniques: “We pass handwritten notes,” he admits, a little sheepishly.

  “The problem here is not that the South African government is spying on its people. Governments have always done that. It’s that they’re actively suppressing information using the Protection of Information Act of 2011, and I’m not just talking about critical state secrets or leaked diplomatic missives, the kind of real ‘national security issues’ it was designed to protect. We’re talking about withholding basic information that affects people’s lives on a day-to-day level.”

  He cites the Vaalwater cholera outbreak in November as a “classic example.”

  “Here we’ve got a municipal district manager who sees an outbreak of a fatal disease in his area, but he can’t get the information on the water supply to find out if it’s contaminated because it’s linked to a hydropower station, which is classified because it falls under national security. As a result, 981 people died. We’re talking about the basic capacity of government to do their job effectively. It’s self-sabotage.

  “There are some things that absolutely should be classified and top-secret, like, say, the blueprints of Pollsmoor Prison. But something like the housing lists should be public information. There are still people waiting for housing, and their impression is that their position on the list changes from month to month. And they might be right, or there might be serious dodginess going down, bribery and backhanders and corruption and illegal tenders, but we simply don’t know. Because we
don’t have access to those lists, because they’re classified. And why? Because people tend to get angry about housing screw-ups, which might lead to a riot, which might lead to them blockading the highway and overturning buses and burning tires, which then becomes a ‘national security issue.’

  “The problem is that you can justify almost anything as national security, and the guy who gets to decide what should be declassified is the same person who decided it was classified in the first place. So he’s got the yes stamp in one hand and the no stamp in the other. It’s mental. And all this is being sold to us as for our own good. ‘Mama government and her Mongooses know best, now run along, dear, and write some more concerned letters to the newspapers.’”

  When I try to raise some of these issues with Makhetha, she’s very sympathetic. “I can understand that some people have concerns. But I’m afraid I can’t discuss that, it’s—”

  “Classified?” I finish for her.

  “Ah yes, your file says your communication style is antagonistic-sarcastic,” she counters. “What I can tell you is that we know all about Clear. We’ve got keyword monitors set up on most of the major Chinese game servers, and we’re already working on ways to embed nanoparticles in paper that will be able to relay the imprints of handwritten notes to our systems. What you have to understand is that this is a global issue. As fast as info terrorists can come up with new tactics, governments are working alongside to develop countermeasures.”

  As she shows me out, Makhetha adds mildly, “Of course you won’t forget to submit the story for pre-approval as per the Media Patriot Act.”

  Of course not.

  The ittaca is wedged into the uneven corner of cell 81C, as if it is trying to osmose right through the walls and out of here. It is starting to desiccate around the edges, the plump sulphur-colored frills of its membrane turning shriveled and grey. Maybe it’s over, Staff Sergeant Chip Holloway thinks, looking in through the organic lattice of the viewing grate. The thought clenches in his gut.

  He has been having problems with his gut lately. He blames it on the relentless crackle of the blister bombs topside. The impacts reverberate through the building, even here, three floors down. You’d think you would get used to it.

  The Co-operative Intelligence Resource Manual does not cover this exact situation. The CIRM advises a recovery period for the delegate, a show of mutual respect to reestablish trust and, better yet, to instill gratitude. But the CIRM also advises that if a delegate is critical, it is critical to press on.

  Terminal is not an ideal result. Terminal can be attributed to lack of due diligence.

  The corridor stinks of urine. Not from the ittaca, which is anaerobic and recycles its waste through its body again and again, reabsorbing nutrients. Strip-mining food. It excretes sharp chlorine farts that puff from the arrangement of spongy tubes like organ pipes fanning down its dorsal side. Just one of the chemical weapons to watch out for in the ittaca’s natural biological armament, according to The Xenowarfare Handbook: Reaching Out to Viable Lifeforms.

  There is a splatter of piss on the door. He needs to have a word with K Squadron. He knows they’re just frustrated. That camaraderie is sometimes expressed in casual acts of hooliganism. Still, the CIRM does not cover what to do when respect for your authority is fraying like the membrane frills of an ittaca’s gastropod foot. When you keep hearing the word maggots, even though this is against protocol.

  When they took occupation of the prison, there were ittaca med-scanners installed outside each cell, bacterial-powered screens monitoring vital signs: heart-rate, brain activity, adrenal spikes in the endocrine system that might indicate a prisoner about to erupt into violence. The first thing the military did was dismantle them.

  They tore the screens off the walls, whooping and hollering, then piled up the ittacan tech in the open courtyard under the shadow of the guard tower—back when it was still standing—and set it alight.

  Security risk, Command said. He never saw a formal directive. Good for morale, General Labuschagne said, when he queried it. C’mon, Holloway. Was he saying his people didn’t deserve a little celebration? After everything they’d been through? It still made him feel uneasy, though. A waste of resources, he told himself.

  He turned a mostly blind eye to the mulch moonshine being not-so-covertly distributed between the reserves because maybe the General had a point. But he circled the groups, making sure no one drank too much of the mildly psychotropic guano distillate, and made a note to find out who was brewing it. He’d have to have a word with them, too.

  It all went wrong, of course. The light from the bonfire or maybe the music seemed to enrage the insurgents, drawing down a fresh assault by the blisters. Chip was the last one through the doors. Dragging Reserve Lieutenant Woyzeck with him, reeling drunk and swearing at him to let her go. Asshat. Shithead. Party pooper.

  His eyebrows were seared off by the heat of a strike, the explosion scouring the reinforced coralcrete with venomous pus and shrapnel. Fucking Kazis, he heard, as someone slammed the door. He’d tried to discourage them from using the term as disrespectful to both the ittaca and those reserves of Japanese heritage. But the blisters are aerial suicide bombers, and what are you going to do?

  You were fucking lucky, Chip, said Ensign Tate, leaving out the “sergeant,” leaving out the “sir,” because Holloway encouraged his people to call him by his first name. And was that grudging admiration in Tate’s voice?

  Chip found an unexploded blister in the courtyard once, deflated on one side and gagging on its own blood from the shrapnel tearing up its insides. Blisters swallow improvised weaponry whole, choking down nails and sharpened scrap metal and bits of coral through their gill slits, like an athlete carbo-loading before a game. Some of the reserves were using it as a football. He chased them off with a warning. But he couldn’t bring himself to shoot it.

  He can’t blame the reserves. There isn’t exactly much in the way of recreational facilities for them. Mainly they take pot-shots at the rats. Which are not rats, but something bald, skittering things the size of Rottweilers, with too many legs. They dig up body parts from shallow graves dug by the former regime and drag them around, scraping off the dried membrane with nubs like teeth, cracking the mantle spines to get to the marrow.

  Let it not be said that the ittaca did not cast the first stone. Let it not be said that this was ever a good place to be.

  Inside the cell, a spasm flutters through the ittaca’s membrane, setting the spines along its mantle clattering. A xylophone made from insect’s legs. Alive, then.

  The ittacas don’t bleed, exactly. They extrude a clear viscous liquid. Tacky, like sap. The first time, it took him forty-eight minutes and a full bottle of military issue stainEZ (guaranteed to take care of even the most stubborn bio-matter tarnish with just one drop!) to get the stickiness out of his uniform. He wasn’t prepared for there to be a second time. But by the third, he wore an improvised poncho made out of a foil body bag.

  He made a note of it in his weekly report. 1x body bag. He is careful to account for almost everything.

  407 Military Reserve Soldiers (human) stationed at Strandford Military Base formerly known as Nyoka Prison Satellite Facility. (Temporary posting.) Broken down as follows: 241 Male. 113 Female. 53 NGS (non-genderspec).

  0 indigenous translators. (Complement of 7 were dismissed on charges of info leaks.)

  123 ittaca delegates (alive) kept separate in 123 cells.

  4 ittaca delegates (deceased) in morgue-lab.

  18 blister delegates (deceased) in morgue-lab.

  6037 blister delegates (deceased) processed through central crematorium.

  550 TK-R surface-to-surface RPGs. Effective coralcrete penetration: 0.2%.

  25 MGL-900s, HE grenades. Effective coralcrete penetration: 100%.

  200 MXR-63 multifunction assault rifles plus parts + 80 000 x 45mm rounds.

  50 000 x 30mm U-238 rounds, incendiary, armor-piercing + 5 x chainfed autocannons +
mountings. Shelved. Useless. Who would have predicted that ittaca would be able to metabolize uranium?

  263 268 carb-blasters (nutritional value as per military recommendations). Sufficient for 213 days of rations for full staff complement. They have been here for 189 days already. This does not fit the military definition of “temporary posting.”

  700 rebreathers, including ample issue for visitors. And there are ample visitors. No rankings. No name tags. If it weren’t for the rebreathers taken off their hooks, set back to recharge, they might be ghosts.

  23 field decontamination tents

  12 carbon atmosphere recyclers; includes 3 overflow tanks and 250 biohazard disposal bags.

  24 x 12-tray silver sulfadiazine 1% topical cream packs for treatment of chemical burns. 1 tray missing.

  1050 field-dressing packs plus standard meds.

  800 standard saline packs plus first aid supply kits. All date-stamps have expired. (Bandages are bandages, aspirin is aspirin, General Labuschagne had said when he raised his concerns.)

  499 body bags aka meat sacks aka take me home daddy.

  Chip came here on the highest commendation. In the provinces, planet-side, he was a core cultural liaison with the ittaca in the villages. Strategically critical, they said. Hearts and minds. This was before everything went to shit. Sorry. Before relations devolved with the indigenous population and assertive action became necessary.

  He learned the basics of the language, with its clicks and liquid gurgles, using a translator pod. But it turned out a lot of it was in the nuance of how you arranged your mantle spines. He was popular with the young potentials, which is how the ittaca describe their children. They would trail behind him on his rounds, popping and clicking, anthropological in their interest.