by JT Lawrence
“You’re tense,” she says, stroking his shoulders. “Your brain can’t function optimally when your stress levels are high.”
At first Seth resists. His nervous system is galloping on the caffeine he snarfed and it always makes him paranoid. What is she doing? Why is she doing it? The deep blue of the ocean outside paints her chest cerulean. It’s like some kind of ocean-themed hallucination.
Her hand travels down to his jeans, unzips him. “You need to decrease your level of cortisol.”
She’s so fucking beautiful and her hair smells like seawater. He decides to just go with it.
“I love a woman who talks dirty.”
She’s got his pants open and starts to lower herself, but he stops her, pulls her up again. Slams his counter down to hip-level and picks Arronax up, putting her onto the ledge. Standing desks are so versatile.
He eases up, then, and they kiss as strangers do: feeling each other out, trying to gauge what the other person likes. It’s an exercise in erotic discovery more than blinding passion. He feels himself swell, senses the hard restriction of denim.
Seth disengages, slowly, from her lips, and moves down to her lily throat. The faintest hint of perfume and salt. Down to her chest. She runs a hand through his hair, then presses a button on her SnapTile and the lab door locks: the LED goes from green to red. The lights dim. The corner camera clicks off.
“We’ve got six minutes,” she says.
Seth unbuttons the rest of her blouse, discovers her beautiful breasts cupped in aqua padding and lace. He pops open the back strap of her bra and pushes up the front to reveal the palest, softest tits he’s ever seen. He buries his face in them, luxuriates in them. God, it’s been a long time. Too long. Takes a small brown nipple in his mouth and sucks hard, massages the other breast in his hand. Arronax straightens her back and sighs in pleasure. Seth’s mind flashes with images of cornrows and caramel. Hot leather. She pulls his head even deeper inside the crispness of her lab coat.
Reminded of where he is, he sweeps up her skirt, and she opens her legs. He accepts her invitation and pulls down her panties. Kisses her again. Uses licked fingers to tease her clit before penetrating her with them. Slowly at first, just the fingertips, until she pushes her hips forward to get more of him inside. Seth goes deeper, deeper, and Arronax revolves her hips and breathes in mounting waves. Arronax groans. She’s close to coming so he slows down, eases off, but never lets her go. Seth pulls down his pants, gets himself ready. He wants her to come when he is inside her, not before. Arronax drags his head up from her breasts; her breathing is ragged. Her body is stronger than it looks. He wants her to bite him.
“Hurry up,” she says, her lips touching his ear. “I want you right now.”
He enters her, and groans when he feels how wet and swollen she is. She groans too: a gasp; a growl. He goes all the way in, then doesn’t move for a moment. They hold each other, breathe each other’s air. It feels too good. His mind is clear of everything except what is happening right then, and he wants to stay there. Stop the clocks. But their bodies have a different idea and a will of their own. Slowly, they start moving together, easing into a steady rhythm, a rocking. His hands on her hips, hers in his hair. Her muscles clench around him. Seth tries to slow down again but they’ve created a momentum now that can’t be stopped. He starts to thrust into her and she groans louder and louder. He thrusts harder and faster and their energies build together until he is soaring and it feels as if she is too. She bites his neck and they both come with a big, loud, bang. Arronax shouts. Seth lets out a rolling moan. A different kind of death in mid-air.
When their breathing finally returns to normal, they’re still clutching each other. Arronax’s face is resting on Seth’s chest.
“Holy shit,” they both say, at the same time, and the lights power up again.
Chapter 20
The Man Who Perforates Her Dreams
Johannesburg, 2024
“VXR can be extremely disconcerting, to begin with,” says the slate-grey psychiatrist, adjusting Kate’s wide-view visigogs. “Some of my patients refer to Virtual Explicit Reality as ‘VR on steroids’.”
Kate’s standing in the middle of the room with her haptic liquisuit on, and she’s already feeling claustrophobic. Her instinct is to run, but she has to do this thing. If this therapy doesn’t work –
Her ear Patch beeps as it syncs with the immersion equipment. The blank room disappears and she finds herself at home. Not Seth’s super-contemporary apartment with its breathing walls and artificial sunrises, but her old flat. The pressed-ceilinged, wooden-floored, plant-filled place in Illovo she shared with James before –
“How?” she says. “How could the machine know what my home looked like?”
“It’s not the machine,” says the doctor, who is now in her home with her. Sitting at the kitchen table. A bowl of green Granny Smith apples appears and the woman picks one up, takes a bite. “It’s your brain that does all the work. It’s not a simulation, it’s a manipulation…of your mind. That’s why everything seems so real. You are the operating system.”
Kate looks around. It’s exactly the same. It’s perfect. Nostalgia peels her heart.
“It’s like…” she says. “It’s like Marmalade is going to just walk through that door.”
“Do you want him to walk through the door?”
Yes. No. She doesn’t know. Which James will it be? The one she loved for thirteen years before she learned the truth? The one who betrayed her, who killed a small part of her, the one she loved so hard, regardless?
“He’s dead. I need to accept that.”
“What do you need to experience in order to accept that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to look back. I don’t want to have to experience that moment again. When I had to – ”
“We don’t have to jump in. Let’s just take it slowly. Let’s go back to your first childhood memory.”
“I don’t have a lot of those.”
“Let’s see what your brain comes up with.”
A clear blue sky replaces Kate’s Illovo flat. She’s in shallow water. Warm. There’s a baby boy, wearing an identical floating device to hers: an orange lycra tube vest. Sam. His name was Sam. Now it’s Seth. The Bad Men named him Seth. A woman with a mass of red hair spins her around slowly in the water. Gentle laughter.
“I know this place,” Kate says. “The river. My mother – my biological mother – used to take us to picnic and swim here.”
“It’s a happy memory.” Dr Voges is standing on the riverbank, arms by her side. Her tailored suit seems out of place.
“Yes. I loved the water. I’ve always loved water.”
“You were loved.”
“I can’t remember that part.”
“But you can feel it?”
Kate looks at her mother. The reflection of the river sparkles in her eyes. She gives Kate a smile so tender and unguarded it makes her want to cry.
“I can feel it,” she says. Tears sting her eyes.
“You were loved,” the doctor says.
Now the river disappears and she’s sitting on a front lawn. The leaves spike her soft toddler-skin.
“Oh,” she says.
“Where are you now?”
Kate looks up, sees Voges standing in the road, watching her.
“This is when it happened.”
“When what happened?”
“When they took us.”
“Who took you?”
“The Bad Men.”
A phone rings. Kate pictures an old set with a rotary dial and an elastic spiral cord. Seth looks up. How old is he? How old are they? Two? Then looks back down at his Thundercats figurine. It’s riding a My Little Pony. He’s wearing a jacket. Peppermint. Hers is Mandarin.
Her mother, who is leaning on the doorframe (Lemongrass Lazuli), flicks off her gardening gloves and goes inside to answer the phone.
No, she wants to say. No, Mom, don’t go, The Bad Men
are coming. But the doorframe is already empty.
Despite the warmth of the jacket, the skin on her hands is red when she looks down at them. Her brother passes her the pony – perfumed plastic – the Thundercat astride. Cheetara. She zooms the pony over the grass. Sam doesn’t smile. Something has caught his attention in the street and he looks past her, frowning. He stands up on his chubby legs, toy still in hand, held against his round stomach.
“Move out the way,” she says to the psychiatrist who is still standing in the street. “They’re coming.” Just in time, the woman in grey steps out of the road.
A black Kombi pulls up and all of a sudden there is a blonde-haired little boy right there, on their pavement. He’s only slightly older than they are. He beckons to them with his hands, his sweet face full of promise. Sam looks at the boy then back at the house, for his mother, but the doorframe is still empty. Kate finds herself beside the rosy-cheeked stranger.
Sam calls out: “Kitty!” and runs to catch up with her.
As they reach the walkway beside the van, the door slides open and a giant man swoops over them, and meaty forearms squeeze the air out of her lungs. Kate chokes. Before they know what’s happened they’re struggling in the car. The other boy, the blonde boy, is stricken. He’s shouted at and jumps in, and the rolling door is slammed shut. From light to darkness, just like that.
Like that, the light in her heart goes out. Nothing but darkness and a shocked wail in her ears. The wailing is coming from her. Kate knows now that she won’t see her mother again, her father. Not like this, anyway, not for thirty-two years. In the dim interior the blonde-haired beckoner’s face contorts with silent tears.
The face she knows so well.
Mom, it hurts so much.
Her Marmalade. Her James.
Kate is doubled over. The grief is still fresh after all these years.
“Would you like to take a break?” asks the grey doctor.
“No,” says Kate. “No.”
This is torture. She wants to get it over with. Tears are streaming out of her nose, and she grasps blindly for a tissue. Dr Voges hands her one.
“Is it real?” she asks, meaning the tissue.
“It’s all real,” says the doctor.
“He was just a child. As innocent as we were.”
“What did they do to him?”
“Used him as bait.”
“I’m sorry that happened.”
She chokes again, tries to not vomit. Wrenches the goggles off just in case.
“I’m sorry it happened to both of you.”
“It happened to hundreds of us.”
“It’s in the past, now.”
Kate swallows over and over, trying to keep the bile down. “How do you get over something like that?”
“It’s possible.”
“I lost both my parents and my twin brother in a split second.”
“It was a terrible thing that they did, kidnapping you.”
“I walked towards them.”
“You were two years old.”
“I walked towards them. And Sam followed me.”
The doctor passes her a glass of water. “You got them back,” she says. “Your parents. Eventually.”
“It was too late.”
“They’ll always be your parents.”
“It doesn’t feel like it. It was too late to fill the black hole.”
“It’s natural to be paranoid about your own kids when you experienced what you did.”
“I keep thinking.” Kate gulps. “I keep thinking that someone is going to take them.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s stupid. I can’t get it out of my head. Who would want to take them?”
“It’s not stupid.”
The doctor gives Kate a few minutes to gather herself. “Is this the trauma that haunts you?”
“This, and others.”
“Which is the worst? Which is the one that caused you to aim a loaded gun at your son?”
Kate hasn’t told her that. Keke must have, in order to get the emergency appointment. The words hang in the air, hurting her.
“Tell me what happened.”
“It was four years ago, at the Genesis Clinic.”
There is a multi-flashback, like vintage camera globes going off: bang, bang bang. Kate sees her abductor parents lying dead on the family room floor, shot execution-style. A comet-shaped bloodstain on the beige carpet. She feels the hard tumble of the accident on Keke’s motorbike, when she thought she and Seth, after just having found each other, were going to die. Then the Alba driver being shot in the head, right in front of her, close enough so that she was misted with his blood. A rabid monkey on a chain. The Nigerian gang hurting an old, loping hyena. Jumping around, crazed by Nyaope or White Lobster, licking dirty teeth, placing a revolver in her hands. She sees the man posing as Ed Miller, sees his dead face skinned by the car’s front windshield. The real Ed Miller’s broken body revealed when the vehicle’s boot sprang open.
Then Mouton. The assassin with the burnt arm. The man who perforates her dreams.
Chapter 21
Baby Blanket
Marko checks his Thai casino winnings and his Ontario clickjacking farm, then follows up on the leads he acquired during the past hour. The first thing he did was to put out feelers on the suspect – Lundy – accused of killing his son. If the man’s got any secrets, he’ll be able to find them.
There’s nothing so far. No documented history of violence or abuse. No criminal record apart from a campus police report from twenty years ago. A minor incident concerning the vandalism of a university statue – some kind of political protest. The institution didn’t press charges, and even if they had, his record would have been expunged by now. Apart from that, Mack Lundy seemed like an extremely boring individual. An average student, he went into an unremarkable career in data sales, married his childhood sweetheart, and had a child. His Flittr profile paints the same picture: a Springbok supporter with a beer boep who plays action cricket every Wednesday and surfs vanilla porn on weekends. A walking cliché.
Keke thinks he’s innocent, and Marko tends to agree. Although it’s possible the man has an undiagnosed mental illness: something that could cause him to just snap. Marko gets the feeling it isn’t the case. No priors involving violence, no social media trolling.
It could have been an accident. The Net knows accidents happen all the time. There have been more than a hundred thousand Volanter deaths alone this year. That’s what happens when people don’t trust the self-flying tech and think they can do a better job.
Satisfied that he has cleared Lundy, Marko rotates on his swivel chair and lets the holo leaves wink out behind him. As he practises typing with his eyeborg, new leaves pop up. He disables the visuals in his search results. No way he wants to see crime scene pictures for this.
During 2019, the Nancies implemented a very basic web censorship – dubbed ‘The Baby Blanket’ by those who knew about it – that suppresses the results of anything they deem ‘difficult’ for the citizens to handle. It includes news of service delivery protests, criticism of the government, and anything with obvious triggers: murder, rape, suicide. There is still bad news, but it’s now seen as ‘better’ news. Their private emails congratulate each other for the initiative’s success, citing stats that proves it’s good for the general morale of the country. They refuse to acknowledge it as censorship. After all, they don’t block the bad news, they just manipulate the search result algorithms to make it more difficult to find. Hacktivists and news agencies in the know are always trying to ‘lift the Blanket’ with varying degrees of success. There’s never been a more exciting time to be a Truther.
It’s not a difficult hack. Toddlers dying under suspicious circumstances – or any circumstances – would be instantly classified as a trigger. Marko just needs to get under the Blanket. He can’t help being reminded of four years ago when Keke asked him to investigate the mystery surrounding Kate
’s childhood. He uncovered not only her abduction as a small child, but the kidnapping of six other kids too. The seven who were taken. It feels like deja vu. A bad omen that burns in his stomach.
He scrolls past headlines he’d rather not be reading.
Three-year-old girl falls down elevator shaft;
Toddler (2) killed in cab accident;
Mother arrested for drowning child (3) in lake.
Pages and pages of results of accidental and not-so-accidental child deaths. Accidents happen, but surely this is too much? The articles create a buzzing in his head. He can’t help picturing Silver or Mally in dangerous situations. No wonder they’ve hidden this.
Four-year-old swallows battery.
He knows he’s naturally paranoid, but how do parents sleep at night?
Boy (2) drinks pesticide.
How does anyone sleep at night? Have kids also caught the Suicide Contagion? Is that even possible?
His Patch tells him that it may be time to take a break: his heart rate is up. It asks if he’d like to do a breathing exercise to calm down. He closes the message. Something is going on here, and he’s going to find out what.
Chapter 22
Eyes the Colour of an Old Bruise
“You up for a trip?” asks Keke.
Zack looks up from his SnapTile. “Sure. After court today?”
“I was thinking of going now.”
“It’s 10am.”
“We can take a couple of hours of personal leave. We’re entitled to it. Besides, we’ll be back after lunch.”
“I don’t know. The trial – ”
“This is about the trial. It’s more important than sitting here, listening to the same thing over and over again. And we can catch whatever we’ve missed later on the refresh immersion.”
