Moxyland (6 page)

   I watch the northern lights flickering above our avatars, the digital representation of myself and a dumpy woman who might or might not look anything like skyward*. The sky loops in fractals of colour, pale-blue fire washing into acid green and purple like tie-dye. Just lines of code, really. Some bored programmer, a kid with extra time to waste. No different from the wannabes re-creating some rock star's mansion. It's pretty. But empty. Just a distraction.

 

Gaborone has all the soul and personality of a strip mall, or maybe the teenage blank-heads who hang out in strip malls all desperately trying to conform. It feels like a shabby wannabe cousin of Jozi – trying too hard, too much hair gel.

   This must be what Americans go through, the sour disappointment, expecting to encounter the exotic when it's all the same homogeneous crap the world over. Only it's Mugg & Bean rather than McDonald's. And this is what we are striving for? Give me Lagos any day, screw the crush and the dirt and the traffic. It's better than that blandly innocuous dust-pit.

   Did I mention the dust? I arrived with a minor chest infection, but it's like breathing silt; the air is thick with it. And it's stinking, sticky humid. Two days in, negotiations are fraught, Mpho is on the verge of a breakdown from the tension, which makes me wonder why I even need a design architect along if he can't take the pace, and I'm getting uncontrollable coughing fits for ten minutes straight. I had to excuse myself from the Bula Metalo meeting. Khan-Ross sent his PA to come see if I was okay.

   The whole thing was hideous. The city. The coughing. Mpho getting all clingy. The problem. It took us four working days to resolve it, and it all came down to the technicalities. My department. Pure fluke that the channel code our push ads were coming in on just happened to be identical to within a digit of the Botswana police authority's defuse signals. Sorting out the code was simple: it was the PR that was a total nightmare, not helped by the fact that Mpho has the EQ of a gecko. Sweet, but not exactly socially adept. He hasn't caught on, for example, that our little sexual sojourn was a one-time limited offer, valid for this particular business trip only – and only then because there's fuck-all else to do in Gaborone except fuck.

   Mpho's about as good in bed as he is a systems designer. Same technique even – mechanical as a piston shaft and unwavering from whatever approach worked last time. And it'll work this time too, if only because he'll eventually wear you down.

   It meant I had to do a shit load of managing in both scenarios, especially with Bula Metalo. Let's face it, I can get myself off, but soothing feathers that weren't so much ruffled as plucked (because Mercedes is a major Bula Metalo client, and they were not pleased that their customers were being electrocuted by their advertising) took a lot more time and effort.

   So eventually, it was all sorted, and we're on our way home, flying deluxe economy, which is one more reason I have to get a new job, but I'm still coughing like I'm about to hack up a lung, and this fat chick across the aisle keeps giving me these dirty looks, and I know exactly what the paranoid wench is thinking. Don't think I didn't notice her call over the flight attendant, the fervent whispering.

   It's no surprise then when Customs pulls me aside at OR Tambo International, ready to slam me into quarantine with the rest of the medical refugees in the camps converted from hangars. Which is not great, considering I have a sortof illegal (in the sense of sort-of dead or sort-of pregnant) cellphone nestled in the lining of my suitcase. A chipped one – defuser-free. Needless to say, Mpho is completely ignorant of this, and manages to make the situation worse by working himself into a state of outrage on my behalf.

   I'm not concerned. A dry cough isn't exactly a typical symptom, but I am not in the mood to play coy with Customs, even if they should be commended for being so vigilant. I have my trump card. Why take the path of least resistance when you can simply eliminate it?

   When the uniform at the counter asks me for my immune status, I snap, 'I think you'll find my company does regular, Health-Dept approved screenings,' and slap down my Communique exec ID, which has the intended effect. Which is that they back the fuck off and fast-track me into the priority queue, the Customs guy apologising all the way. 'We're so sorry, Ms. Mazwai, if we'd known, it's just the risk, and there's been an outbreak in Tanzania; they've closed down Dar es Saalam…' Like I care.

   'It's so boring,' I tell Mpho, who agrees absolutely with whatever I say. 'You'd think they could just formalise the process and issue us with corporate passports. Or segregate the flights, like they do on the underway. How much is that to ask, really?'

   Two hours and seventeen very mellow minutes later, thanks to a combo of Dormor and vodka served on the connecting flight, we arrive home courtesy of the corporate underway doorto-door. Mpho tries to grope me in the lift, a clumsy invitation to spend the night in his apartment, but I'm too exhausted to break it off or even avoid breaking it off with a mercy fuck. Besides, my apartment has a better view. It gives me obscene satisfaction that I'm one floor above him in the Communique residence, even if his is a single pad.

   The door opens to my SIM ID and total cacophony. Jane twitches guiltily. home™ is in rebellion, the system flopping between settings like a dying fish, desperately trying to accommodate all our personal pre-programming at once. The stereo is genre-blending, overlaying the banal pop she likes onto the frantica dub I got compliments of Toby, bass lines colliding with the alarm.

   I can't say it's not interesting, but it's wrecking the effects of the Dormor, especially with the lights strobing, caught between the sheerday blue I prefer and the warm orange plush Jane's convinced she likes after she read some colourtherapy article in the pushmags, and plunging sporadically into darkness as some kind of compromise.

   Jane is the kind of desperately depressing unattractive that would be borderline pretty, if only her nose didn't resemble a ski-jump or her jaw weren't so pointy or her hair wasn't such a stringy orange, just for example. Nor, sadly, is she the kind of girl whose personality makes up for her physical limitations. As far as I've paid attention, Jane's tastes seem to be a pastiche lifted from pushmag articles, TV makeover shows and social networking recommendations that keeps her comfily secure within her own genre.

   Oh, and did I mention she's in Accounts? And let's face it, at thirty-four, way too old to be stuck in middle management. Catch me still hanging around as executive programmer eight years from now.

   Infuriatingly, Jane hits the off switch on the remote.

   'Oh nice, Jane. Give me that. How am I supposed to restore the settings if it's off?' I turn it back on and click onto the menu. 'Christ on ice. What have you
done
? Pass me the keyboard.'

   'I'm sorry. I was only trying to record
Ángeles
de la Calle
,' which is the soap Jane is happily addicted to, a remake of a 1951 Mexican telenovela, only sexified, modernised, stripped of context and colour. A bit like Gaborone. A real bleach job. And particularly perverse, considering you can stream the original on the Retro channel. Okay, so it's unwatchable, unless you're a total fanboy or an academic, or alternatively, stoned with the subtitles turned off.

   'I already set that up for you.'

   'But with the rugby–'

   'It's a clever system, Jane. It would have registered the reschedule automatically. Oh, never mind.' I reboot home™ manually, so it defaults back to the original settings. God only knows how she managed to do so much damage with the remote. 'There. It's all set up for you.' But I do it in such a way that it's going to cut off the last two minutes of the episode, overriding the download manager that normally insures against such eventualities. And you know what these things are like. Can you say cliffhanger? She's going to die.

   'Can you do me a favour and
not
touch anything in future?' I snap. Jane looks so miserable, I almost recant, until I open the fridge and see that she hasn't bothered to place a grocery order.

   There's only ice cream. Thank God Communique has twenty-four hour chefs, which is one major benefit (apart from the sea view, of course) that made defecting from New Mutua all worth it.

   I don't ask if there's anything Jane wants, although when I place the order with the kitchen, I throw in a side of avo maki. Keep your friends close and your enemies and all that. I'm just going to ignore the contradiction in how this philosophy pertains to my ruining her soap. The rules of contempt decree that you have to play nice occasionally.

   I take a shower and decide the only way I'm going to get the dust (and okay, that man) out of my hair is to cut it off. So when the doorbell goes ten minutes later, I'm busy hacking through my braids with a pair of sewing scissors. Naturally, I assume it's my sushi. But home™ logs the SIM as Toby. I waver about whether I really want to let him in, whether I can handle him right now, decide what the hell, and instantly regret it as he lopes in still wearing his peel, fresh from a surf on the Communique beach. He's soaked. And his backpack is squirming.

   'You're dripping on my carpet.'

   'Nice hair,' he responds with real admiration, and leans down to kiss me on the mouth, a little too intimately. I shove him off, but, unlike Mpho, he's not bothered by the rejection. 'Gotta towel?'

   Jane steps into the lounge to see who it is, and her face clouds. She and Toby share a prickly antipathy, although she flat out refuses to admit it's because he's not corporate. She's internalised enough feel-good talkshows to know you should never confess to being a bigot.

   I've been cohabiting with her for eight months now, assigned as live-ins according to synchronous personality matching by Seed. The overlap of our schedules is usually only an hour or so a day, not including weekends. I don't know how she manages to be so bad at number-crunching that she has to work overtime so frequently. Maybe she's trying to impress someone, get that promotion which is always and forever going to pass her by in favour of a smarter, better, more attractive candidate.

   Not that I'm complaining. It means we stay out of each other's way, and she's oblivious to how I really spend my down time. (I could even confess to having maybe given Seed a little nudge in this direction, but hacking Communique's central database would be a violation of company protocol, and subject to a downgrade at the very least.)

   Toby is still bitching. 'What is up with the security pricks? Like I haven't been here a squillion billion times before. Scratch that your visitors should have free rein.'

   'Yeah, but then who knows what kind of streetside degenerates would wander in.'

   'People like me, most probably,' Toby grins.

   This is old routine. Even though I've hooked Toby up with a Communique Preferred Visitor's card, he has a habit of losing it. I don't let on how much this irritates me, because then he'd only do it on purpose, the same way he always ups the slang to get under my skin.

   'Poor baby. Lumped in with the civilian dregs again?'

   'Separate entrance and all. Back of the train. Can you tell?' He sniffs himself suspiciously and then flumpfs into the couch, still wearing his peel. Jane bites off a little squeal of dismay.

   'But never mind my travails. How was Gabs?'

   'Shit. Thanks. It's this big push on Push–' Toby snickers gratifyingly. 'But their cellular network is a shambles. It doesn't have the bandwidth to cope with the content, and there have been horrendous glitches with Bula Metalo's ads conflicting with the defusers. So it's ads or social control. Your choice.'

   'Sounds like a good time to be a criminal in Botswana.'

   'Uh, yeah, apart from that whole death penalty thing.'

   'Hectic. Forget the work shit. I only asked to be polite. Did you get it?' Toby grins lopsidedly in that way that girls find attractive, although, honestly, he's more interesting than beautiful, especially since he's started cultivating his beard.

   Jane is still hovering in the alcove anomaly squeezed between the kitchen and the lounge, which is but one of many factors that reveals our apartment was originally intended for one inhabitant and then converted, which only makes me more bitterly resentful about being lumped in with tedious finances girl.

   'C'mon, let's get you that towel,' I say, downplaying his comment, and because I'm dying to see what's in the bag. And yeah, okay, because otherwise Jane is going to have a coronary about the couch. I'm not completely heartless.

   'Should I call you when the food is here?' she chirps.

   'You got edibles coming?' Toby perks up. I might have suspected he would have the munchies.

   'Straight from Communique's premier chefs.'

   We traipse into my room and I close the door. Toby unpeels, weaseling out of the skintight suit that protects him from all the pollutants in the water. He's not wearing anything underneath.

   Jane assumes we fuck, but Toby and I worked that out of our systems years back. And besides, he's too promiscuous. I know that sounds hypocritical coming from me, but I'm careful. I throw the towel at him.

   'You're still not eating enough.'

   'Girls like a boy on the skinny. And besides, it's not insufficient food. It's oversurplus drugs.'

   'Speaking of which.'

   Toby grins, and like a cheap magician, summons a joint of sugar between his fingers. But when I reach for it, he holds it above his head.

'Uh-uh. Did you get it?'

'Maybe. You gonna tell me what's in the bag?'

   'Maybe,' he shoots back. I pass him a lighter, and all play is put aside as he sucks the joint to life.