The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories

by Diane Awerbuck

  ‘Yes, I fucking know, man. I’m the one lying in a tunnel asleep so that I’m out of signal range in case Sella didn’t do my blocker right or the fever didn’t take and I was suddenly Saldanha’s most wanted. You know mos I have foetal alcohol syndrome.’ Wolkie said it not without a certain pride in the full label. ‘I took different outschool, but I do actually get it.’

  ‘No, listen. You don’t get anything. The trapps listen to whatever they’re in but they also all listen, all of the trapps – they have another frequency. That’s how the weather forecast happens and the flood forecast, billions of data points. The whole Earth listens and the servers pay attention to what it hears. And every year, trapps get smaller and they get put into more things. And you know, unless you skipped every course in outschool and I would believe it if you had, that fish and birds make their own trapps now? I mean the eggs have little trapps inside them that self-assemble and grow as they grow.’

  ‘The FAS kids don’t do Nano, we just do the core subjects. They showed a video once about Antarctica but it was from Kewmsimsie about how well the Sadec towns there are doing.’

  ‘Okay, have a chocolate milk while I tell you. This is going to be more useful to you than however much outschool you did. Can you open it? Ja, okay, so all the trapps make up the mesh, right, and that is where the weather and sea report comes from? You know that video when you eat a tern – they all have trapps in – and the panda starts talking and you get that nausea that the normal crackware can’t stop?’

  ‘Gweilo’s does.’

  ‘Gweilo’s lying, man. He just bucks up. The crackware can’t stop it because all the trapps have another frequency and that’s where the Wowof messages come across. You can’t block them. But here’s the thing: you can listen in. The encryption’s rubbish. Sella has like five baby drones that we modded that can tell you ships, flood, animals, police birds, everything.’

  ‘So who gives a fuck. I’m blocked now. That’s the point of being blocked: you can just get on with it and not be spied on by drones and trapps.’

  ‘You are lying in a tunnel, full of blood and stitches, and your entire job is gone. You need to start thinking, man, and you must start quickly. I am telling you how you don’t need minutes, ever, ever again – you just need to be on this frequency. Because I’ll tell you what’s starting to show up on this frequency, Wolkie. It’s everybody who’s gone, everyone dead. The mesh is billions of ears now, down to mosquitos and termites. They are finally picking up the softest voices. I heard it. You can listen to it now if you want. Come close to my ear.’

  ‘No, man. Listen, I am actually going to be fine. You can leave me now, I’m going to get up tonight and walk back to Aluminium 1 and find the guys. Thanks for the story.’

  ‘Okay, mister,’ Gideon replied in a quieter, but steely, voice. ‘But Sella said I must just give you a last injection to get that skin to close up properly. It’s going to put you out, but don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you come back.’

  Hannes laid a tarpaulin over the silver boxes of chocolate milk.

  ‘Mans! Make sure you put all these in after Gweilo is finished with the saw,’ he yelled at Mansoor, who was stacking electrolysis units into the SAS Assegaai’s tiny submersible. Out in the bay, ships were filled with steel for Antarctic smelters and the boys had rowed out to one of them and attached a two-kilometre cable. Thousands of units had been sold over the years to kit out the museum submarine’s escape pod with rebreathers and electrolysis apps to a standard that made Hannes and Gweilo and Mansoor confident, especially when all three were together, that they would make it to Queen Maud Land alive, that the pod would hold, that the ship wouldn’t cut them loose if they were discovered. But when any two of the boys were alone, they found ways not to mention the plan or its chances.

  Gideon was shouting now, and gesturing in the dark from excitement.

  ‘You see now, Outschool? And they tried and they are trying to cover it up, but they never had a hope. It’s just about frequency, it’s just about listening really quiet and listening long. We could do it here.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘What the cloud hears is cancelled people, man. Dead people show up on the trapps, a few bytes here and a few off a satellite on the other side of the planet, and a few months later from a trapp inside a marker bird flying to Antarctica. But it adds up; the server can’t stop matching it up like it does with everything else and what it matches up is talk from dead people.’

  ‘And what do they say? And who are they talking to?’ answered Wolkie, tolerantly.

  ‘They play the fucken social games, for one thing. That was the first proof – more members on Second Life than its government had citizens, that sort of thing. They looked into that very carefully, looking for fraud and that, and when they couldn’t find any, it was basically official. On the i they show up and talk about anything, man, because they are in the cloud. They were lying there being leftover energy, sort of, but the cloud got over the whole earth, bigger and bigger and the mesh had to get thinner and finer so it could read insects and plants and it started picking up these guys. They show up now. And they do what they want. You can find them if you look. They are slow: It takes weeks to hear a full answer out of them.’

  Wolkie knew that Gideon would have to be kept amenable to his own full recovery and survival for a full day yet. He agreed to everything. He asked easy, encouraging questions. Gideon grew in enthusiasm, and didn’t kiss him again when they both watched a long Terre Adélie war film.

  Gideon was shaking him.

  ‘C’mon, I’m going to show you.’

  ‘Man, listen, piss off. I’ve got a gash in my head and I’m sleeping.’

  ‘Grow up and come to the beach and see how you don’t need to buy another minute of i in your life.’

  The dunes were silver and the sea a complicated set of blues and blacks with a clear moon-coloured causeway seeming to run the length of it to Antarctica. It smelled of salt and seaweed more than oxidised metal, and the Kewmsimsie hills and kloofs looked small and blue and somehow majestic at that distance. Wolkie was, for a moment, proud to be from there. Distantly, in the outer bay, were more ships than he had ever seen at once. It looked like he had been right about the aluminium price. Gideon had disappeared, but he called and Wolkie turned to see him carrying a flapping seagull.

  ‘Take this trapp, okay? Now hold it to your temple. Okay, if that’s not working, put it in your mouth like this. Yes, okay. Now follow the instructions. Okay? Okay, you’re twinned; you with it now. Okay, now hold the bird’s neck and let’s make a small slice there, just under the skin really … Hold it tight, man. And we put it in – I really need you to hold it tight – and we close it with this skinclip. Okay, now just wait.’

  The bird took a few steps, cawing loudly, and flapped a few times before flying off. Immediately Wolkie heard a low hiss.

  ‘What was that trapp? What is the point of this?’

  ‘That bird’s flying to where they all go at night, across the bay. Now, wait for it get far away, and listen.’

  The two boys sat down. Wolkie was tired of Gideon and wondered if he was fourteen yet and if being outdoors meant that the block had taken and that he could leave and find the boys. He might not have quota, but he had decided before that ten years of living together as one in Kewmsimsie was not nothing. The boys were probably at the Volvo hill now, sorting out the big cache of trapps and making sure each one got his share. The bird couldn’t be seen anymore and the hiss from the trapp was getting soft.

  Then Wolkie heard them. Snatches of words, then static, then moans.

  Gideon saw his eyes widen. ‘Have you got i still? Come, man, turn on your interpreter.’

  Can’t believe static the damage static at least fifty ships and their effluent static. ‘This is just radio, Gideon. And I’m going home. After it took me eight years to pay your lot off for my capp, I’m not going to be sold another little piece of your North Korean shit.’
>
  ‘If it’s radio, how are you picking it up from a tracker app inside a bird?’

  ‘From i.’

  ‘You don’t have any i. You got uploaded during the fever. Your block took. Check your About Me’.

  Wolkie clicked into his own statistics and there, next to his quite high and flashing heart rate, was 14y00m01d05h12m30s.

  ‘By the way, the boys came through the tunnel during the fever. They’re on the dunes somewhere, heading for a town. Maybe they got tired of you making them slow … especially now that you don’t get outschool quota. They will have to find another guy under age, if they even stay together. You did divide up all your trapps before you came here, right?’

  Wolkie knew that Gideon wanted it to be true, but from everything he knew about the boys, it was true. It took being alone for it to make sense. Hannes, Gweilo and Mansoor were the most efficient people he had ever met. He knew that a great sadness was coming to him, but that it would take weeks to really arrive.

  Gideon turned to him, his face very bright and large in the moonlight. ‘Let’s upload. I mean, let’s really go into the cloud. No more dunes and rust town and eating gulls for a treat, none of that. We can have quality. Good colours, good speed, no bodies, no getting sick. We can know everything. We can talk to everything. We can go everywhere. You haven’t got anything but the Yards after this, cloud man.’

  ‘But we can’t change anything,’ Wolkie answered fairly softly. Maybe Gideon heard him over the waves and maybe he didn’t.

  The knife that had cut the seagull was in Gideon’s hand. ‘Let’s go, Wolkie,’ he said, and stepped closer.

  & Found

  Liam Kruger

  By rights, Sebastian should have been the one to leave town when Clara left him – gone north, into the comforting brace of family and nostalgia – but she had beaten him to the punch by taking a road trip with some exchange students he had never heard of. Not wanting to seem unoriginal, he had stayed put.

  Something needed changing, though, and since all of his old bars were now off limits – haunted either by memories or by friends with a habit of taking Clara’s side – he had taken to straying further and further downtown. Beyond the strip of varnished-wood boutiques near his flat, beyond even family-owned late-night cafes, his nights now took him down the narrow, poorly paved roads whose names he hadn’t known six weeks earlier, to the dive bars and speakeasies cut out of former residential units, identified only by flickering neon signage, if that.

  Not that Sebastian noticed his downmarket trajectory. He spent most of his time reflecting on how his new breakup beard looked, or if it would be okay to wear sweatpants at a bar. The kinds of places he was going to, it typically was.

  It was in one such bar that Sebastian met the only real magician in town.

  It was a poorly lit place that held two-for-one specials and open-mike performances on the same evening, so as to flush the scum out in one fell swoop. The bar was a mess, but Sebastian reasoned that that was fine, because he tended to be one too.

  An all-ukulele Billy Idol tribute band was in the middle of their set when Sebastian, on his third happy hour already, stumbled in and tightroped over to the bar. Finding safe harbour on the varnished wicker of a barstool, Sebastian sat and regarded the three-woman band innocently slaughtering ‘Hot in the City’ at the back of the room; they were reasonably awful, he decided, but since he was wearing sandals, he figured that he didn’t get to have an opinion. Even so, he was surprised by the size of the crowd. A drink materialised before him and a little money disappeared from his pocket. He slumped forwards.

  The breeze coming in through a busted window sobered him up a little; Sebastian found himself raising his head above his drunk waterline to watch the bar’s other patrons. He couldn’t tell if they were regulars or not; his brain did him the courtesy of emptying itself most nights. Some of the people were dressed up – not just relative to the bar in question, where matching socks would’ve been fancy, practically dressy. Jackets, suspenders, the usual number of teeth. Knee-high dresses. Women in knee-high dresses; one such was seated next to Sebastian, typing out a message on her phone at speed. The blue-green light illuminated her torso; the angles of her collarbone jutted visibly out of the straps of her leopard-print dress. On the edge of her nose rested thick-rimmed glasses, and on her mouth, a cherry-red splotch. She did not look up from her phone while Sebastian took these features in.

  Sebastian felt like maybe he should warn her, let her know that somebody had given her bad directions, but the effort of keeping his eyes from rolling into the back of his skull was becoming distracting.

  He was kept quiet, in any case, by an abrupt silence following the tribute band’s final song, and a dimming of the lights that shut up anybody insincere enough to try and applaud. A susurrus moved through the crowd.

  There was no way that the bar could afford spotlights, and yet a white beam of light shone on the space where there had once been a makeshift stage, backed now by high, blue velvet curtains. One of the Billy Idol tribute band’s members appeared from behind them, now dressed in something pink and frilly. She grinned and curtseyed at the audience, transformed from the dour performer of a few minutes before. She spoke: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, would you please put your hands together for the only real magician in town – Andre!’ The girl stepped to one side and gestured towards the parting in the curtains from which she had emerged.

  Sebastian was surprised by the frills and the glassy look in her eyes, but applauded along with everybody else, although with less vigour than the leopard-print girl next to him.

  An unseen hand took hold of one end of the velvet curtain and wrapped it around the ukulelist-turned-magician’s-assistant. A man in a black waistcoat stepped out into the light, his back to the audience, and whipped the curtain away, revealing – nothing. Or – no, there was movement where the assistant had been, a shuffling of wings. Sebastian craned his neck to see. A pigeon, mottled and harassed, shook itself, cocked its head to one side, and took off. The man with the waistcoat turned to watch the bird go, submitting gaunt cheeks and a patchy beard to the spotlight’s attention. The audience began to applaud. Sebastian smacked his hands together with the audience, watching the pigeon make two full circles around the dusty interior of the room, and fly directly into a windowpane. It crashed to the floor with a wet sound. Sebastian leaned over to see where it landed, but this made the bar tilt dangerously around him, so he stopped. Nobody else noticed; Andre the magician had moved on to his next trick.

  There was no music, no new legerdemain with the lights; just Andre, and his greasy, shoulder-length hair, baggy trousers, bleached-white shirt and black waistcoat, standing under a spotlight whose origins Sebastian still could not trace, performing sleight-of-hand and projecting his voice poorly. Some tricks were impressive: he managed a half-dozen card shuffles whose complexity Sebastian was in no state of mind to appreciate, but the look of triumph on the performer’s face compelled Sebastian to applaud. Other attempts, like when the bouquet of roses that he was meant to pull out of thin air got stuck halfway out of the magician’s inner pocket, were somewhat less proficiently handled.

  Sebastian wouldn’t have minded so much if the audience hadn’t seemed intent upon responding to every single trick, successful and otherwise, with loud whoops and cheers. The leopard-print girl had been on her feet for the entire show, making wolf calls.

  Still, somewhere around the third vanished coin and second infinite handkerchief, the audience began to show signs of fraying at the seams. Some bow ties had come loose, and one muscled youth had lurched to his feet for long enough to yell, ‘Get to the real part, you shi—’ before being yanked back down by a friend. Andre faltered at this, biting his lip and fumbling the intricate knot he’d been presenting to half of the audience. Even so, the crowd cheered.

  Sebastian turned around in his chair to face the bar – receiving scandalised looks from his neighbours – to concentrate on the task of staying drunk
enough to keep his mind from going to unpleasant places while remaining sober enough to avoid passing out. It was a subtle sort of procedure, and Sebastian lost consciousness almost immediately.

  He dreamed in quick, short bursts: spinning rooms, the strip of bars around him, Clara with him, Clara leaving, Clara gone. Then merciful dark swept in around the corners and he didn’t dream at all.

  He was startled awake by that sudden inexplicable vertigo that sometimes jarred him out of his dreams – although in this case it was an entirely explicable vertigo, as his barstool had tipped over, which he realised a couple of seconds after hitting the floor. Sebastian got to his feet hurriedly, hoping to demonstrate to the world at large that he wasn’t yet drunk enough to get thrown out – but the world at large was looking elsewhere. The magician was saying something onstage, and, at last, he had his audience’s full attention.

  The stage’s sole occupant was perched on a thickly stuffed armchair that hadn’t been there before. He had his fingers steepled in front of his thin face, and a black hat sat on his lap: the magician’s hat, squat, cylindrical, midnight-coloured and velveted. The kind of hat that novelty costume shops have made an industry out of failing to reproduce accurately.

  ‘I told you I wouldn’t do this again,’ Andre was saying. His voice was low, and cracked – either with emotion or an unfinished battle with puberty – but the morgue-like silence of the room carried the magician’s voice further than it would otherwise go. ‘I’d like that to be clear, all right? I don’t like doing this.’

  ‘Get on with it,’ hissed somebody in the crowd, quickly hushed by his neighbour.