Zoo City

by Lauren Beukes

  Account sharing is when someone else uses a user's password to check accounts, mails, msgs and even move code around in their Pluslives. Most of the time it turns out that somebody stole somebody's @nother, or hacked their way in, or whatever. Nobody likes having an unwanted avvie running around in their Pluslife, so they report their ID, and management puts them on my lister. Like Malessa77 here. And then it is the end of them.

  Here I go. The port-plugin took me to this place, so she has to be inside. I hop the fence and stroll the walk. Wow. The digi-roses are srsly primo code. They smell and feel real. I am impressed. I'll put in for one on the next reqform. My habzone is not this swank, but I do alright.

  The secure on the door is good, but not admin. I don't get to play with my Pluslife stats much, so this will be fun. All SWAT with none of the training.

  >>Cnapce/PlusAvatar/Adjust >>Avatar/Strength/+99

  It doesn't feel any different to me in the rig, but I know the world will react right. My code++ foot turns that high-priced doorframe encryption into scrapcode at a single click-n-drag, and I am in.

  The graphic chatroom is even more prime than the hab's shell. Most of these private sceneboxes are where the richies show their true colours. You know, either leave the place all white00 or pull out the pr0ncode and let their freak flag fly. Décor by Martha Stewart with a few touches by the Marquis de Sade or maybe Himmler. But not this place. This place is full on swank. The carpets match the shades, the furniture is all high… I guess high dollar, being Sydney and all… and the atmos-code is exactly like that potpourri my stepmom used to set out on Boxing Day. Top stuff, all of it. Even includes a jpeg family photo over the mantle. I am almost sorry that I have to admin Malessa77. She has put a lot of time on the keys into this joint.

  A shame, really.

  Each room in this place is just as fanced up as the last. It is something special. Back toward the rear of the place, I can hear a voice. No, two voices. It's another chatroom, so I can't see what's being txt, but I can follow the stereophonics.

  The door at the end of the hall pops open and there it is, the story unfolds. Two young ladies, their avatars all remarkably normal for Pluslife images, are lying in bed inside. By the state of things, I'd say I was just too late to see one helluva show. Oh well. Wait. One of them is Malessa77, but the other. The other is lister number four. LthreethreeT is the brunette on the left. Two for one. Fantastic.

  >>Malessa77: I don't know who the hell you think you are, barging in here, but

  >>LthreethreeT: Uhm, Mal, I think he's Company. >>Malessa77: Really? Oh God, that means

  >>LthreethreeT: Sir? Mister, uhm, what can I call you?

  Since they are both here. I don't get out much IRL, and being around two nudies is a great way to spend my time on the clock.

  >>Cnapce: It is probably better if you don't call me anything. Easier anyway.

  >>Malessa77: Easier? Oh god, no. Please don't. This is all we have. >>LthreethreeT: He isn't going to care, Mal. They don't know how. Corporate bullies.

  Bully? I fuckin' don't think so. It's just a job, chickie. You and your digi-lez friend are breaking the rules. Time to pay up.

  >>Cnapce: User ID Malessa77. As per your digital SID signature, you have been found in violation

  >>Malessa77: No! She didn't hack me! I GAVE her the code! >>LthreethreeT: It wasn't her fault, it was my idea. Leave her alone, you fuckn wage-slave!

  >>Cnapce: of your Terms and Conditions agreement with the Pluslife programming code. As per said agreement

  >>Malessa77: This isn't fair. I can't live without her! I'm quarantined! This is the only place we have together! Don't take it away! Don't take HER away!

  >>LthreethreeT: It's okay, baby. I'll find another SID. This corporate

  douche can't keep us apart.

  >>Cnapce: your account has been

  >>Malessa77: I luv u, Linda. Whatever happens to me, remember this place. Our dream house. Remember me! I lo>>Cnapce: terminated.

  Her avatar's perky little B-cups pixel out, and I almost feel bad for her. I hope they don't ban her complete. You know, full disconnect. A suspension. Yeah, that's what her and her friend will get. I'm sure of it. Oh yeah, her friend.

  Wow.

  I didn't know Pluslife avvies could cry.

  Streaks of digital pain and synthesised anguish colour-tint LthreethreeT's rose19 cheeks, and if there was a player-mod for eye beams or aggro-static weapons…my avatar would have just been pwned by the look she is giving me. I actually have that worried tingle in my gut, like the feeling right after cheating on a lover. This is the shite part of my job.

  >>LthreethreeT: You rotting corporati bastard. You just killed the only thing I loved. I can't afford the med-pass to see her IRL. This is all we have. Had. Past tense. Fuck you.

  >>Cnapce: Chill. You guys broke the rules. I'm just doing my job. >>LthreethreeT: So I guess you have to do your job on me, too. >>Cnapce: Yeah. I'm sorry.

  Sorry? Why the hell did I just txt that? THEY are the rules-breakers. THEY fucked up. Why should I be sorry? Oh well. It's syntax now. It'll fall off the cache when she is gone.

  >>LthreethreeT: Sorry? You will be. Keep your eyes on the Sydcast news for the next couple of days. My name is Linda Barrows, look for it in the obits. I can't live without her. I'd rather die than go on

  knowing she is wasting away in a med-centre alone and suffering

  without me.

  >>Cnapce: No you won't. You won't kil

  >>LthreethreeT: We both know you don't care. You are a soulless corporate slave marching to the tune that key turning in your back is grinding away. Just fucking get on with it.

  She's right. She is just pixels and memory bytes to me. I can't let her slide. This is MY livelihood, after all. I gotta watch out for Player One, you know?

  >>Cnapce: User ID LthreethreeT. As per your digital SID signature, you have been found in violation of your Terms and Conditions agreement with the Pluslife programming code.

  Her avatar's last emote, standing there naked like she forgot to buy clothes-code, looks at me with sadness scrawled on her face. She is holding a jpeg in her hands. It shows two women, arm in arm. One looks like an athlete, maybe a footie player. The other looks like all the warning ads I have seen about the last big outbreak. She holds it out like a mirror at me, filling my monitor with the image. I have to do this. It's just another job. Heh, @nother job.

  >>Cnapce: As per said agreement, your account has been terminated.

  She closes her eyes the moment before the pixel storm sweeps her away. The jpeg goes along with her. So does the room. The furniture. The drapes. The art. The walls. The entire hab scrambles out and becomes an empty lot with an Ebay page already forming for its auction.

  Full disconnect.

  Oh well. Job's done. I'm paid. That's what it is all about, right? Keeping your head above water and making your way through RL. Yeah. And all that shit about offing herself? Really? No way. It's just a game. Nobody really dies because of the shit that happens in Pluslife. No way. Digital lives, not real ones.

  Wait a sec. My lister just chirped out at me. I must have scored a bonus gig. Exactly what I need to get that melodrama-mama out of my head. I mean, who dies over something like that? Life is never that bad.

  >>Lister 08.10/

  >>>User ID: 10 (delinquent account) >>>Location: Cape Town

  Great. Another bum not paying his bills.

  >>Cnapce/port >>Dest/Cape Town//453.10

  Time to take out the trash.

  Land of the Blind // Charlie Human

  Agent HK – Ideological Security Unit

  The corporate function of truth is to tell the various parts of the mechanism what to do. Of course it doesn't actually have to be truth, not in the absolute sense. It just has to fit in with the rest of the system. After this last kill, I understand that more so than ever.

  My handler Shaw had been a commander in the apartheid security police. He wanted to show me how serious they were so he s
topped me turning left for a week. Easy as implanting a neuromuscular programme that told my body that left turns were a no-go. "That's a level one programme" he said. "You're primed for level four." I tried to deviate a couple more times but eventually I just did what he said.

  Drew

  The factory bleeds iron and vomits sparks. I am luckier than some. Luckier than the endless supply of desperate people from the Rural who transport the ore and drop weekly from respiratory diseases.

  I feel it coming on but there is only an hour left before the end of

  the day. All the signs are there; the flickering vision, the exhilaration, the hissing of a stove-top kettle and the smell of burning. Taking a break would bring down shit from my supervisor. I carry on working even as the exhilaration builds and the world bleaches out.

  I look around, blinking stupidly. Everything is saturated with light. One of the Rurals is pulling my arm and pointing at a spill on the factory floor. What the fuck is he trying to say? I can't tell. Is it oil? But it's too bright. A contorted shape lies next to the spill. I struggle to make sense of it… Joseph.

  "Ja, it's like I tell everyone, this is a hard business and people get hurt," my manager says. Somehow I'm in his small office on the factory floor. "I know you have medical condition."

  I cross my arms over my chest and huddle in the hard plastic chair. Joseph had been cleaning one of the machines, hunched over it scraping out the metal silt. When I whited out, I fell onto the control panel.

  "Listen, I understand you're upset, but you can't blame yourself," my manager says. "Christ, these guys from the Rural can barely read and write, let alone operate machinery properly."

  "It was my fault," I say.

  "Who the fuck cares, the Riffa is dead," he says. I wince at the slur. My parents were staunch anti-classists, and bigotry directed at Rurals always makes me uneasy. "His family will get paid out and everyone will be happy." He sighs, then hesitates, as if deciding whether to say something. "Andrew, I'm recommending a doctor, a corporate." I look at him, not understanding. I wasn't a Corporate Citizen; I didn't get corporate medical aid. "You're doing valuable work here, and XMET looks after its own," he says.

  My phone buzzes with a temporary access card to Waterfront City. He puts a hand on my shoulder, like a fat pink spider.

  "Listen, take a break, and spend some time with Kara." Despite everything, I'm surprised he knows my wife's name.

  My voice is shaking as I tell her what happened. I hear her little nieces laughing in the background. Playing mommy has taken on an edge lately. Kara says she just wants to give her sister a break, but to me it looks more like practice Or an invitation. Or an ultimatum.

  There's a long silence.

  "I thought you said the fits weren't happening anymore, Drew," she says.

  "They weren't."

  She breathes out deeply.

  "I'm…" I want to tell her what happened. I want her to understand. But I don't. "I'm going to be home late."

  Agent HK

  I watch the interview again. It's hosted on a trendy subversive site, one of ours. Like everything else, dissent is easier to control from the inside.

  The vlogger is American, her hair tied back in blonde dreads under a R4000 Dolce & Gabbana beret. She's overwhelmed at meeting a real life resistance fighter. Matthew Ibrahim, one of the Lionesses' inner circle. He comes across as bitter, cynical, the girl's adulation seems to make him tired. I wonder if he'll feel guilty when his brother dies. If he comes back for the funeral it'll be like a gift to Shaw. A chance to kill the one that got away.

  So, Matt, like how did you get involved with Thaba Godima?

  The draft. It appeared on my phone on my eighteenth birthday, indicated by the mandatory Governance ringtone. From that point on I had two days to reply or it was a Zimbabwean labour camp. There was no way I could join the Coporate Service Platoon and Godima was the only other option.

  Were you close to Nata Mzani? Is she as hardcore as people say?

  I don't know if I'd describe the Lioness in those terms. She's incredibly focused. It's part of her training. She was with an MK cadre in Angola during the First Struggle, but after it ended, she refused to take a cushy job in the new government. They hated her for it, more for opposing them. She went into exile and then returned to plant the seed that was to become the Second Struggle and Thaba Godima.

  What did you do in Thaba Godima?

  I was a Changent, short for "change agent". We were an elite unit trained in Godima camps to fight the power network of the ISU. Did you kill anybody? Are you kidding me?

  And what was the deal with the Easter War. That was rough, right?

  We had an alliance with the Soldiers of Gaia, an eco-survivalist movement who also opposed Corporate. We had a…falling out after they found some of our cadres cooking an endangered species of hare, but it was the bush, what were we supposed to do? They executed them mafia-style. It turned into a war. We only found out later it was a set-up. The ISU killed our guys and made it look like the Soldiers. We took the bait.

  Like Drew will. How could he resist. I shut down the streamcast. It will be enough to link him to his brother, to bring everything tumbling down.

  Drew

  "Homemade bio-fuel, larnie," the cabbie says, smiling apologetically through missing front teeth. The old car splutters and jerks as he edges it into the stream of traffic, hooting as a cavalcade of black vehicles flashing blue lights roar past us

  We pass the decaying Greenpoint soccer stadium. It looks like the skeleton of a giant spider squatting on the tar, the WELCOME 2010 decals faded but the plastic veneer of the grinning official mascot is still surprisingly bright. I wonder how anybody could have ever thought it was cute. It's a demon, a tokoloshe that grinned maniacally over the lean and brutal years that followed the World Cup.

  We make our way slowly through the traffic toward the towers of Waterfront City. The contrast between it and the surrounding area is stark. Lush vegetation rises up from the gleaming glass towers.

  I'm ushered in to see the doctor, a large man with soft, jowly face. "That's a Stone," I say gesturing at the large oil painting behind his desk of a mushroom cloud over Cape Town. I know from the art magazines my parents collected that it was called "The Spill", even though the real thing it hadn't been like that at all. There had been fires, sure, but not like that, more like a progressive poisoning of the land with radiation.

  I thought it was garish, typical of Stone, the egocentric young African artist that had wowed the world, reaching superstar status before chaining herself to the body of an Aids victim in an unknown location and starving herself to death. She had documented it by webcam as her last work and her final minutes were still one of the most watched clips ever. You could buy t-shirts with her emaciated face on them at Greenmakt Square.

  He motions for me to lie down on his examining table as he consults my record on the medical database. I lie still as a hovering machine scans my brain from different angles. The doctor keeps up a subdued banter through the flashes, but I hardly hear what he says.

  We wait in silence for the results to appear on his desk console. "Mr. Ibrahim, there's no easy way to say this," he says finally. "You have a severe form of epilepsy that has been improperly treated." He pauses to gauge my reaction. "Your episodes, as you call them, have caused lesions to form on the brain."

  I nod and he continues.

  "No patented medicine exists to treat this," he says. The world contracts to a tiny point in front of my eyes. I think of Kara and the children we'll never have. I know in that moment that if I can't be helped then I'm going to leave her. To give her a chance at the life she wants. And before she leaves me.

  "Wait," the doctor says. "There is an option. Lodafril. It's not patented. I don't have to tell you what that means." He watches me carefully for a reaction. I don't blame him. Offer black makt meds to the wrong person and you'd end up in a labour camp, even if you're a Citizen.