How We Found You

by JT Lawrence

“No.”

  “Then, yes, we’re going on a joyride.”

  Keke auto-inflates her helmet, plus a spare for Zack. She puts on her tinted eye-mask as a special precaution to protect her BioLenses then folds down her visor, straddles the bike. Zack hesitates, then climbs on the seat behind her.

  “Ready?” she asks.

  They roar off and zoom through the city, dodging cabs, pedestrians and shabby tuk-tuks. Keke has been driving Nina for so long now the machine is an extension of her body. She doesn’t have to think; she clasps the humming seat between her thighs and the rest is instinct. Smoke and pollution mixes with the heat coming off the road and makes the air choke-worthy, but once they’re out of the chaos of the CBD and the air clears, Zack’s body relaxes against hers. The problem with riding a bike is that once you’ve experienced the open road this way, it’s difficult to go back to the claustrophobic confines of a car cabin.

  Twenty minutes later, Keke pulls to a stop outside the Carbon Factory. It’s the Crim Colony in the south of Johannesburg. She shows the guard at the entrance her press ID and mumbles someone’s name. Usually, visiting here as a journalist, she has to supply her DNA Profile Code and verify it with her fingerprint, retina scan and a cheek swab, but for some reason they’re going easy on her today. Maybe her contact – the one whose name she mentioned to the guard – holds more sway than she realises. They’re allowed access and shown where to park; Keke grabs a spot under the solar trees. It seems so quiet after having the engine rumble in their ears.

  “I wasn’t expecting this.” Zack motions at the charcoal-tinted building. The structure was designed by a tenderpreneurial trust fund kid with more cheek than sense. After it was built, it came to light that his architectural degree wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. He paid a cheapjack college for his ‘qualifications’ and paid an equally dodgy designer to draw up the plans. All in all it cost him a few hours of expensive lunches and easy bribes, and he made more than twelve million rand.

  Not bad going, making a million rand an hour. Viva corruption and bribery.

  “It’s quite a thing, isn’t it?” says Zack, looking up at it while shading his eyes from the sun. “I’ve never seen it in real life.”

  The draughtsman had “taken inspiration” from the Suprematist influence of old Soviet architecture – he basically plagiarised a drawing he found online and mixed it up a little – and the result was a peri-modern brutalist building with an expressionist leaning and a lunar edge. It left most conservative South Africans puzzled at best and besieged by inarticulate fury at worst. Despite its corrupt beginnings, Keke liked it.

  “I was here in ’19, when they cut the ribbon. I was covering the story. There was still a lot of criticism back then.”

  They skip up the concrete steps.

  “I remember that. The architect. Some kind of greasy deal.”

  “Not just that.”

  Just the idea of having penal labour camps made a lot of people uncomfortable. The Nancies had tested it in various provinces, moving convicts out of overcrowded prisons to live and grind in underground platinum mines and vertical cannabis farms, and found that it worked well. The crims learned skills and earned wages, with which they paid for their food and board, and had mandatory saving schemes. Within a few years the convicts, instead of being a drain on taxpayers’ money, were turning a profit for the SACS.

  Human rights organisations and the international press had a field day, saying that South Africa was up to its usual terrible tricks, and accused the president of furthering a neo-Apartheid agenda. Colonisation, even of dangerous criminals, was very much frowned upon. The outrage hadn’t lasted long. Europe had its refugee problems to deal with, China was invested in space mining above all else, and America was at bio-war with Russia, so after some mean headlines the outrage, and the journos, moved on.

  They approach the building’s front entrance where men in full riot gear stand guard. Whole-face visors, batons, tasers. Kevlarskin overlaid with exoscales, and not a smile in sight. Glass doors slide open, and they let the pair through without even glancing at them. Next they’re in the X-ray box which beeps its approval of their unarmed status, and a woman wearing a bulletproof skinny-onesie pats them down. She clicks a torch on, next to her head like a stopwatch, and looks in their mouths too.

  “So much for going easy on us,” says Keke, as they catch the conveyer belt to the convicts’ res. They’re accompanied by two guards: one in front, one at the back.

  “I guess they need to be careful. Don’t want their cash cows breaking out.”

  They scoot past what looks like a warehouse and then, behind an impossibly high glass wall: a barn of workers with face-masks and protective glasses on. Busy with assembling something directly in front of them, they don’t look up. Their hands are like synchronised swimmers, dipping in and out of whatever it is that they’re putting together. By appearances, it seems to be an extremely well-oiled machine. The belt takes them further into the factory, and they pass more barns of workers, and more armed guards. Misters spray the air with sanitiser in scheduled bursts, and security cameras follow their progress with red LEDs.

  “Imagine,” Keke says under her breath, as they go deeper into the bowels of the building “if they decide to keep us in here. We’d never be able to get out.”

  Zack pulls a startled face at her.

  The factory’s business is carbon capture. Gigantic pumps suck CO2 out of the surrounding atmosphere and converts it into useful products: pre-fab rock brix, graphite pencils, compressed carbonites, and they spill the leftover O2 into the air. By 2026 they’ll be able to package and sell the oxygen, too. Asia can’t get enough of the stuff. Fresh mountain air is the most popular, and most expensive. Switzerland exports bags of it to Taiwan. Factory oxygen doesn’t quite have the same appeal, so they’re working on ways of making it novel. They’re putting their money on flavoured oxygen, and are currently experimenting with ice cream flavours: Cara/Choc/Mint; Hazelnut Brown-butter Swirl, and of course, Nostalgic Neapolitan, which sounds like one of Kate’s paint colours.

  “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?” says Zack.

  They get a private room for the interview. As they sit down on plastic chairs, the corner cameras swivel in their direction. Zack is about to say something when they lead the convict into the room. She has circles under her eyes the colour of an old bruise. Melange overalls held together by stitched-on patches, and a strange haircut. Keke thinks that the woman must cut her own hair; must sew her own clothes. Maybe they all do.

  She stands up. The noise the chair makes scraping the cold concrete floor makes them all cringe. The crim has stooped shoulders and stares down at her bound wrists.

  “Mrs Nash,” says Keke. “Thank you for agreeing to speak to us.”

  The woman looks up at her. There is no life in her eyes.

  “Does she have to wear those?” Kekeletso says to the guard. “Those cuffs? They look uncomfortable.”

  The man doesn’t answer her.

  “I mean, she’s an accountant, for Net’s sake. Not a gang leader.”

  They’re new-tech handcuffs and look like something out of a steampunk movie. Designed to administer behaviour-correcting pulses of either shock treatment or medication. They haven’t had a riot in this wing since they switched to these smart copper bracelets. The less dangerous crims wear them around a single ankle. The powers that be can drop the entire prisoner population with one button if it comes to it; paralytics are handy like that. But by the look of Helena Nash, Keke guesses they use her cuffs to administer psychotropics: mood stabilisers, maybe, or anti-psychotics. Seth would be able to tell her.

  “I told them I didn’t want to see any more reporters,” she says, eyeing Keke’s press ID.

  “I know. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.”

  “No more journalists, I said.” She keeps tucking her hair behind her ear, despite it not being out of place.

  “I know, they t
old me, but that’s not why I’m here. This isn’t for a story.”

  “Ha,” she says. Bitter smile. Dry lips. “You think I’m stupid.”

  She slumps into her seat.

  “I believe you’re innocent,” says Keke. Zack sits up a little straighter, leans in.

  “No one believes I’m innocent,” she says. “Didn’t you see how quickly they sped through my trial? I didn’t even have a chance to explain myself. Not properly. They were in such a hurry to just lock me up and throw away the key.”

  “It did seem like an especially short trial,” says Keke.

  “What do you know about it? Were you there? Weren’t you one of the bloodhounds in the courtroom who were baying for blood?”

  “No,” says Keke. “I wasn’t there. All I know about your case is the file I have on my Tile.”

  “Liar,” Nash says.

  “What?”

  “You’re a liar. No way you have that file. It’s buried as deep as a dungeon floor. All our files are,” she gestures as if there are hundreds of other convicts in the room and she is the nominated spokesperson. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know that the government hides all this shit?”

  “We do know that,” says Zack.

  “We can’t go around upsetting the general fucking public, can we?” she says in a shrill, put-on, voice. “We can’t let them know that there is this dark underbelly of putrid shit underneath everything good. One day the whole city – the whole country – will just sink into it. Sink into the muddy, shitty lava that is our shadow side.”

  “I – ” starts Keke, but the woman interrupts her with sour breath.

  “You just go along with your life and think everything is okay. You in your designer leggings and your fancy jacket. Drinking overpriced coffee and thinking everything is just fucking dandy. You think the crime stats are down. You think all the bad people are locked up in mineshafts and factories. It is not the case, let me tell you. It is not the case, even though the government wants you to believe it. The stories in here,” she says, “the stories I can tell you.”

  “I’m very interested in the stories,” says Keke. “I want to hear them, if you’re willing to talk.”

  “Ah. What’s the point?” Nash says, tucking her hair in, “what’s the point? They’ll just lose your articles just like they lose everything else that’s not sunshine and fucking roses.”

  “I’d like to hear them anyway,” says Keke. “But today I need to ask you about something else. Something specific.”

  The woman cocks her head to one side, blinks. The temperature in the room seems to drop.

  “You want to talk about Erin?” she says. “I can’t talk about Erin.”

  Chapter 23

  A Heart. A Clock

  The Cape Republic, 2024

  Seth is eating lunch. Prawn-flavoured coleslaw in a salmon-swiped wasabi wrap. He holds the food in one hand and jots down his free-flow ideas with the other: blue and red markers on recycled sheets of paper. Food at the Nautilus, while excellent quality, leaves a little to be desired in the inspiration department. He can’t help but see the parallel in his own work. Mathematically sound, but ultimately insipid.

  That said, the motivational session with Arronax this morning shifted something in his thinking. He realised, as he was holding her, that he has to go back to basics. Skin on skin, that is the thing, especially when you’re dealing with something like the human heart. He closed down all his predictive algorithms, let his holos wink out, turned off the transparent heart that had been floating before him, taunting him with its clumsy, lumbering rhythm. He grabbed an A0 notepad and markers and set to work, starting from scratch, writing down every formula, equation, and pattern he could think of that could spark the solution.

  He’s thirty-three pages in, now, and something is happening. He’s still miles from the final pattern, but at least now he is on the right track. Every page edges him nearer to the answer.

  He looks up at the clockologram: it’s 12:38. The Powers That Be wanted this work by noon yesterday. They extended his contract for another 24 hours. So he’s late for his already-extended deadline. Is that why he’s nervous? He’s not used to the feeling. He likes to think that anxiety is for other people. A problem he has solved on multiple occasions with his pharmadesign. Has a corporate deadline ever scratched at his nerves? He doesn’t think so. Something else is going on. 12:40. What is he missing? And then the picture of Kate pops into his head. Kate. The kids. Has something happened? Surely he would know? He’ll call her to check on her, as soon as he’s finished with this page.

  12:43. He can feel the tentacles of the solution reaching for him. Without taking his eyes off the page, he discards what is left of the wrap. Numbers at the periphery of his brain, like words on a tip of a tongue. It’s no use trying to grab them: that makes them disappear. He knows he needs to coax them out. He keeps scribbling. Swaps colours when a new concept emerges. 12:45.

  His eyes keep going back to the clock, as if he’s late for something. He thinks of Arronax’s lips, her inner thighs. Stop the clocks, he had thought when he was with her. He looks at the clockologram again. Is it the numbers? 1245? Almost Fibonacci. Almost the golden sequence, but not quite. 11235 is the beginning of the Golden Ratio. No, it’s not the time on the clock that’s got his attention, it’s the clock, itself.

  A heart. A clock. What is a heart, but a clock? And like every clock, a heart has a finite number of ticks in it. The maths behind the twenty-four hour, sixty-minute, sixty-second day won’t help him, so what other patterns are there? Seth senses the beginning of relief. He can feel the answer is finally in his head, he just needs to find it.

  Seth is in the middle of the lab, on the ground, surrounded by paper sheets and scrawls when Arronax arrives. He holds a marker to his lips. His hands and arms are tattooed with marker dye. He writes a few more fraction sequences down, numbers that are illegible to anyone but him. He changes the colour of his pen and, starting from the top sequence on the page and working down, he draws a complicated spiral that joins the lines of every fraction. It grows to take up the whole bottom of the page: an inverted hurricane. He snaps the lid back onto the marker and then looks up at her.

  “I need my Tile back,” he says.

  “Of course.” She nods at Carson, who leaves to get it.

  “I still need to test it, but …”

  “But you’ve got it,” she says. “I can see it.”

  He stands, puts his inked-up hands on his hips.

  It’s 12:59.

  “I’ve got it.”

  “So,” says Seth, explaining the equation to Arronax as he types furiously on the holopad, mapping out pinpricks on the model heart of where the cardiomyocytes should be printed, “clockmakers – old school clockmakers – used to rely on the Stern-Brocot tree.”

  She blinks at him.

  “It’s like Fibonacci, but super-sized,” he says, still typing. “Or, rather, super-deep.”

  “How long will it take you to upload the sequence?”

  “Not long. It’s self-perpetuating, so the machine can take care of it after the first few lines.”

  Arronax brings up another holopad on the counter and begins typing too. She brings up the 4D model between them and watches his progress as tiny dots start appearing on the organ.

  “Who is she?” she asks.

  “What?” says Seth, “Who?”

  “That woman you keep thinking about?”

  Seth stops working, scratches his scalp with the back of a pen.

  “You’ve got to stop doing that,” he says, then continues to work.

  “I can’t help it. You have an extremely…interesting mind.”

  “Isn’t it against your Nautilus ethics or something?”

  “Desire pays little attention to ethics.”

  Seth remembers a specific moment from the day before and there is a rush of warmth to his equipment. He clears his throat. Does this woman want him to finish the job or not?

/>   “Keep working,” she says.

  “Easy for you to say,” he says, adjusting himself. “Do you use your psychic-switch on all of your conquests?”

  Her laugh sounds good.

  “You were not a conquest. I was doing what I had to, to move the project along.”

  “I feel completely used,” he says.

  Arronax laughs again. “No, you don’t.”

  “No,” he says, trying not to smile. “I don’t.”

  “Believe me, you want the switch on. Why do you think it was so good?”

  “Yes, I thought that might have something to do with it.”

  The artificial heart beats once, twice, then shudders to a stop.

  “It would be even better if we were both wearing one,” he says.

  Arronax bites her lip, says: “Absolutely not, Mister Denicker,” but then she writes out on a piece of paper in front of him: Perhaps that can be arranged.

  The heart starts again, this time beating three times before stalling.

  “What do you think?” she asks.

  “I think that sounds bloody marvellous.”

  Chapter 24

  A Red Stamp on the Tiles

  Johannesburg, 2024

  “Please,” says Keke again. “I think you’re innocent.”

  Helena Nash looks down at her lap.

  “Are you innocent?” asks Zack.

  The convict swallows hard, tidies her hair. The cuffs glint in the harsh fluorescent light.

  “No one is innocent,” she says. “Not really. That’s what I’ve learnt in here.”

  “But you’re innocent, of what you were charged with.”

  “I’ve learned that luck is everything,” says Nash. “Have you ever heard of moral luck?”

  Keke shakes her head. Maybe she’s wrong about this one. She seems unhinged. Maybe she did do it.

  “Moral luck,” she says. “Some people are in here because they were unlucky. Simple as that. Here’s an example. My father was a terrible drunk. Terrible! I mean – ” She puts her bound wrists on the table in front of her. “We won’t get into it. But he was a bad man. And he never spent a day in jail.”