The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘We didn’t even know,’ Naila muttered, as she pulled the video bar on her palm back to rewind. They were watching from her Bead, which was projecting the footage onto a wall at the New Kasama house. They had been holed up there since the rally, trying to regroup.

  ‘Look.’ Naila pointed.

  They looked. A sea of bitty lights, then a hoarse sea of darkness washing over the scene.

  ‘We’ve seen it a million times,’ Joseph said exasperatedly.

  ‘Yes, but—’ She pressed pause. ‘Why did all our Beads cut out at the same time?’

  ‘Power cut?’ Jacob shrugged.

  ‘No,’ Naila mused. ‘Our Beads kept on working after the microphone cut. Remember the lights?’

  ‘Yes.’ Joseph stroked the beard he had been growing. It covered his acne scars and made him handsomer. ‘Beads are powered by our nervous system so they don’t need to be charged.’

  Naila turned off her Bead. ‘They must have shut them off, through the cloud.’

  ‘AFRINET still works when the power is cut?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Yes,’ Joseph said. ‘AFRINET servers are plugged directly into the grid at Kariba. They don’t ever shut down, even when our devices do, even when there’s load sharing.’

  ‘So, we can never truly take control of our own Beads,’ said Naila, head in her hands. ‘Government can always hack them through the web and we’re stuck with them in our bodies.’

  ‘Unless we cut off our hands,’ said Joseph with a low chuckle. ‘Or blow up the grid.’

  Naila rolled her eyes. ‘But if we blow up the grid, how will we even access the Beads?’

  ‘Drones.’ Jacob stood up.

  Naila and Joseph exchanged a look. Drones had turned out to be the most nefarious tech of all. But Jacob was walking around, explaining that his drones didn’t need the cloud.

  ‘They communicate with each other with Bluetooth. And they are solar-powered.’

  ‘So,’ Naila said slowly. ‘If Beads are powered by our bodies and drones by the sun…’

  ‘Our Beads can communicate without the cloud.’

  They discussed various ways they could go about it. They could use Bluetooth to create virtual private networks that would get around the government’s control of the Internet. They could string a chain of communication from drone to drone to reach air towers outside the borders, and tap into Wi-Fi from one of the seven countries that surround Zambia.

  ‘None of this matters unless we target the grid and shut down the cloud.’

  ‘The electrical grid isn’t just the cloud, guys,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s people’s lives. We need to make sure we warn them.’

  ‘It is okay, comrade,’ Jacob laughed. ‘We are used to power cuts in this country.’

  * * *

  Months of planning later, their mission was ready. It was plugged into each of their Beads.

  SALUTE:

  Size: Three-member squad.

  Activity: Plant transmitters in 3, 4.

  Location: 16.5221°S, 28.7617°E. Kariba Dam.

  Unit: SOTP.

  Time: 22.10.23 1800 hrs Central Africa Time.

  Equipment: Rope, harnesses, ascenders and aiders, anchor gear, carabiners, webbing and slings, abseil devices, gloves, helmets, Gore-Tex suits, tent.

  Naila had driven into the dam during the late afternoon, posing as a tourist, a gear bag in the boot crammed with equipment – to scale down the gorges for fun, she would have said, had she been asked. Tons of people came here for extreme sports these days – ziplining and bungee jumping and white-water rafting and mountain climbing. In the end, the security guard had waved her in without question, shaking his head at her choice to do her tourism in the rain, hurrying back to his booth to get out of it himself.

  She inched the Mazda through the gates and along the top of the dam, rain sweeping over the windscreen. She looked to the left and the right – the precipitous drop on one side, the lake’s tremulous surface on the other, as if respectively epitomising the sheerest of vertical and horizontal planes. When she reached the south side, she pulled into a shadowy corner of the visitor centre car park, right next to a statue of Nyami Nyami, the Tonga god. It had a spiral body with a long curved head like the alien from Alien. Naila turned on the heating system to fog up the windows. Then she looked in the rearview mirror.

  ‘Okay,’ she whispered.

  ‘It is hot in here!’ Jacob sat up from the back seat with a grin, pulling off the blankets he’d concealed himself under. He looked like Black Panther in his Gore-Tex suit.

  ‘Please leave the heat on.’ Joseph sat up from the floor, coughing feebly. His wrinkled black outfit made him look like a disgruntled server at Debonairs Pizza.

  They waited quietly. An hour later, Mai stepped out of the visitor centre, in gumboots and a wide-brimmed hat that brought out the Chinese in her by connotation. She would drive the car out, pretending to be Naila – an easy match, beige skin, black hair – so that the parked car wouldn’t give them away. Mai hopped in the vehicle, and they hopped out and crept to the boot to take out the gear bag. Jacob knelt to peel off the faux licence plate, revealing a second plate underneath, and rapped the boot with his knuckles. The brake lights glowed red, then vanished as the Mazda crept off to the exit gate at a snail’s pace.

  They headed up into the hills to wait for nightfall. The forest was green and heady, drunk on rain. It stormed the whole afternoon and they were glad for their camo-coloured tent and their helmets – Joseph had insisted on them although the black ones, on back order, had taken longer to arrive. The rain stopped just as the sky dimmed from lavender to slate, the cloud cover blotting out the sun and the moon. The sun was due to set at 18:05. At 18:00, they left. They would have thirty minutes before the security lights came on.

  They headed for the dam, the curving 2,000-foot wall with its six sluice gates like lidded leaking eyes, rust-coloured stains yawning down under each of them. They jumped the gate and snuck along the top of the dam, hunched over, cleaving to the low wall. The sky growled and flicked out a silvery tongue but held its spit. When they reached the middle of the dam, Jacob started placing cams and nuts in cracks. Joseph held back, crouching and handing Jacob anchor gear and rope. He was afraid of heights. Naila wasn’t a big fan either – she’d been slightly skittish ever since her fall from the jacaranda tree – but she distracted herself by tightening her harness. Jacob handed her the ATC belay device and jumar. She girth-hitched a sling to her harness and threaded her rope through the ATC. Then she straddled the wall, took a breath, and lowered herself into the chasm.

  * * *

  She zipped down – Zhrrrrrr-rrrrrrrrrr-rrrrrrr-fuck she had lost control of the rappel-rrrrrrr-rrrrrrr-rrrrrrrrrrrr-rktch – until the knot at the end of her rope finally stopped her. She gasped at the jolt to her crotch and waited for the swaying to stop. She looked up at the dam, which merged strangely with the sky – the same dark grey – and made her feel like the whole world had tilted vertical. A knot of puke rose up her oesophagus. Then there was a flash of light and she saw the seam dividing the dam from the sky.

  She swallowed. Was that lightning? Mmmhmm, the sky rumbled in confirmation. Two more flashes above, smaller and more permanent: the guys’ Beads. She turned hers on too and glanced at her fingerless, palmless glove – she’d cut out a square patch in the centre for her Digit-All screen. 18:11. Shit. She switched her Bead to torch mode and scanned up the dam towards the sluices. There.

  She raised herself up slowly. Zhr. Rrr. A minute later, she was hovering in front of the two middle sluice gates. They were enormous – almost thirty feet across – each with horizontal metal grids and a jutting lower lip of concrete. Between them was a ten-foot wedge-shaped wall. Her goal was to place a transmitter in each one. The rain started spritzing again. She unzipped her hip bag and pulled out the first transmitter. She activated
the magnetic clamp on it and reached out for the sluice, but it was too far – the curve of the dam’s edge suspended her a few feet away. She heaved herself towards the dam, grunting as she kicked her leg out uselessly. Fuck. She tilted her head back. The rain touched soft fingers to her face. She clicked on her Bead. 18:14. Sixteen minutes. She dialled Jacob’s Bead.

  ‘Sup, comrade,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m too far from the dam. I need you to rock me.’

  ‘I got you,’ he said. She could almost hear the smile in his voice at the implication.

  She heard Joseph’s anxious voice – ‘What the fuck is going on?’ – then the line cut.

  She felt herself swaying side to side and spinning as if Jacob were pushing her on a tyre swing. She giggled. The rain fell harder. She turned to the sluice as it zoomed towards her, reached out her hand and stuck the transmitter to a metallic protrusion on its inside wall. She tugged the rope – next – and Jacob tugged it back – Roger. She felt the vibration of the rope above as he dragged it ten feet against the edge of the dam to pull her in front of the other sluice.

  The rain was pouring now and she could barely see. She couldn’t get a grip on the zipper of her hip bag, either. She pulled off her glove with her teeth. She unzipped the bag with her bare fingers, pulled out the second transmitter and turned on its magnet. She tugged the rope twice, hoping Jacob would understand the command. He did – she began to sway to and fro now, nearer to the dam each time, until finally she reached out her arm and—

  Zhrrr – she slipped down and her knuckles slammed into the concrete wall below the sluice, ripping off a layer of skin. Shit. Zhrrr – she dropped down another foot. She hadn’t tightened her autoblock enough and was sliding down the wet rope. She tightened the knot, licked the blood off her knuckles, and pulled her glove on again. She gritted her teeth and jugged up. As soon as she reached the right height, she tied off and locked this time.

  Zhrrrrr-rrrrrr-rrrrr. Puke glubbed up again like wax in a lava lamp, but it wasn’t the sound of her slipping down her rope this time. Someone else had abseiled down and was hovering beside her.

  ‘Jacob?’ she whispered. ‘Thank frikkin God.’

  She turned on her Bead. Green eyes flashed towards her.

  ‘You were in trouble,’ Joseph shrugged with a trembly smile, then gave a high-pitched sneeze. The echo of it ricocheted around them. At least it sounded like a bird.

  ‘Shhh,’ she shook her head. ‘I just have to do the second transmitter.’

  As if on cue, her rope began to sway again. Joseph gave a yelp – that sounded human – then hushed as he realised Jacob was manipulating her rope from above. She slammed the transmitter into the second sluice and swung back towards him. Joseph grinned at her, as if he had accomplished something too. Then he cocked his head.

  ‘Would you have preferred it if Jacob had come?’ he asked but before she could roll her eyes, the floodlights clunked on. Zrk-zhr-rrr – she immediately started jugging up. There would barely be enough time to get out before security noticed two giant spiders clambering up the wall of Kariba Dam.

  * * *

  This morning had felt both weary and wary. After a restless night camping in the forest, they had snuck out at dawn and boarded Mai’s fishing boat, the Vulture. They had dozed the afternoon away on board, Mai telling stories about Kariba Dam, Joseph and Naila turning them into philosophical treatises on the nature of colonialism. Finally night fell and they sat in silence, drinking and waiting. A light flashed and they turned, half expecting to see a bigger boat coming by, maybe the Matusadona. But then the light flashed again from above, and now the thunder came, as if the sky were clearing its throat.

  ‘You people,’ said Jacob. ‘We must be serious. Are we sending these machines tonight?’

  Another flash. Rain bristled the air. The thunder requested their attention once more.

  ‘Okay,’ said Naila. ‘Let’s do this.’

  They crowded around a small table nailed to the deck, where Jacob was seated in front of the box of drones and a heavy-looking black controller. He had programmed the Moskeetoze to seek the transmitters they had planted inside the dam’s sluices. Within minutes, each sluice’s inner surface would be lined with their tiny bodies. Sluices often got jammed this way with detritus like leaves or sticks that the workers had to clean out, so the infiltration had to be subtle. Thousands of drones would creep into them over the course of the night, just enough to cause a malfunction.

  ‘So they’re ready?’ Naila asked.

  ‘Whenever we are.’ Jacob pointed to an unmarked button on the controller. They stared at it, then at the tinselly drones in the box beside it.

  ‘You have warned the peepo?’

  Naila looked around, blinking. She had almost forgotten Mai was here.

  ‘Am asking because that is what the bazungu did wrong the fest time with this same dam,’ Mai said. ‘They did not give the peepo proppa warning.’

  ‘Ya,’ Naila nodded. ‘The effect will be a nationwide power cut. That’s the warning.’

  ‘It is okay,’ Jacob smiled at Mai, charming her. ‘This time, we know what we are doing.’

  ‘Actually, we don’t.’ Joseph’s lips slid past each other. He was leaning against the table. He was tipsy and Naila could smell the sour flu on his breath, like chikanda.

  ‘Ach, shuttup, man,’ said Jacob. There was no anger in his voice, just irritation.

  The storm winds were starting to make the lake rock, which was making the boat pitch.

  ‘Look, I know the rally didn’t work, but we have to be careful about direct action,’ Joseph grumbled. ‘It always just harms the people it’s supposed to help. We’re shutting down a dam that provides electricity for millions. Mai is right. We should send out a warning now.’

  ‘We’ve gone through this, babe,’ said Naila. ‘We’re shutting it down just long enough to jam the cloud. Then we’ll send a signal out to coordinate a resistance movement, and get everyone plugged into SOTP so we can operate outside government surveillance.’

  ‘But remember the history of this place?’ Joseph squawked. ‘Remember Project Noah?’

  ‘Operation,’ Naila and Mai corrected at the same time.

  ‘And that was just animals!’ Joseph protested. ‘We’re risking people’s lives.’

  ‘You did not seem to mind risking people’s lives when it was for the Virus vaccine,’ said Jacob.

  ‘That’s not the same.’ Joseph shook his head. ‘Look, we’re brothers here, man—’

  ‘We are not brothers!’ Jacob shouted and got to his feet.

  Lightning crackled the sky – a brief, incomplete shatter as if in the surface of an obsidian vase – and pale light bounced off the wooden surfaces of the boat. The rain began to come diagonally through the open sides. It was already raucous on the surface of the lake. Jacob and Joseph were arguing across the table bolted to the deck, yelling over the noise of the storm. Bead light striated the air. Naila shook her head and strolled to the bar to pour herself another drink. Mai followed, her hands on her hips.

  ‘What is this bluther stuff all about?’ asked Mai, eyeing the men.

  ‘Who knows?’ Naila shrugged and handed her a G&T. They toasted carefully – the boat was still pitching. Glass clinked, lightning flashed, and one man punched another in the dark.

  ‘Shit.’ Naila put her glass down and ran over to break up the fight, placing one hand on Jacob’s arm and the other on Joseph’s chest, repeatedly shrieking a single word – STOP! But her voice could not compete with the rain or their tussling. Mai watched the three revolutionaries slipping around on the wet deck, fighting for the upper hand.

  Finally, there was a heaving pause, lit haphazardly with electric light – man-made and natural, Beads and lightning. Jacob was seated at the table again, panting. Joseph was standing across from him. Naila had wrapped her arms
around Joseph’s chest from behind, hugging him or holding him back, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. Mai sipped her G&T.

  ‘Pussy,’ said Jacob. He said it quietly but it cut through the noise of the storm.

  ‘I’m not fucking afraid,’ said Joseph, sounding afraid.

  Naila groaned and let go of him. The storm held its breath. Jacob reached forward and at the same moment Joseph reached his hand out to the table. CLICK. It seemed as if the storm were exhaling again but as the sound zithered up and out and began ringing round, it was clear that one of them or both of them had pressed the button on the controller. The drones ascended, glittering bits rising from the box. Mai pointed at the swarm with redundant wonder. They watched the drones go, scattering their murmurous sweep over the water, looking like pixels, then like ash, then like smoke. Naila turned her head and vomited.

  ‘Mwebantu!’ Mai stepped forward. ‘My boat!’

  ‘It does not matter who pressed it,’ said Joseph. ‘It has been pressed.’ Then he applauded and persuaded everyone to smoke some mbanji in celebration. Jacob agreed reluctantly. Naila mopped up her vomit with a rag, on hands and knees like a servant. When she returned from washing her hands in the loo, Joseph grabbed her and started slow dancing.

  ‘You see?’ he kept saying. He was playing an old WITCH song through his Bead. His high had cheered up his drunkenness. He danced badly, switched his hips back and forth as he spelled out the old band’s acronym: ‘ “We. Intend. To. Cause. Havoc.” You see?’

  Naila chuckled throatily and let him spin her. Jacob was watching, sitting on the floor, leaning against the door to the head. Mai sat on a bench with her legs splayed, sipping at her drink. The rain stopped and the clouds cleared like chorus girls to let the moon shine. They would dock in the morning and send a message from the SOTP across the hacked Beads, inviting the Zambian people to join Cha-Cha-Cha 2.0.