Bioxy scanned the barcode on their wrist. The machine rumbled and played a melody reminiscent of a nursery rhyme. When the melody ended, food slid out in a circular container and Bioxy took it down to the wave breakers and sat down next to Amadi.
“So, this is it?”
“In fifteen minutes we’ll roll up over there and get out,” said Amadi.
Bioxy looked over to the parking lot littered with bits of glass and weeds shouldering through asphalt. “Barefoot?” they asked.
“Don’t know how we dodged all that glass.” Amadi’s attention was not on the parking lot, but on the undulating water ahead of them.
“Here we go,” Bioxy pointed, drawing Amadi’s attention to a car gliding into the parking spot and turning its white lines red.
Welcome Onai Family. A voice, emanating from the ground, said.
Two half-dressed boys got out of the vehicle and raced across the lot. As they ran their shorts and socks unclipped themselves and zipped back into the car.
“Be careful you two!” A mother’s voice, struggling to inhabit an octave of authority, said.
If there was anything Amadi admired most it was the way his mother scolded them with tenderness, sometimes speaking so delicately that Kamari and he would have to lean in, from their twin beds, to hear the shapes their reprimands were taking. Amadi watched the boys in underwear climb onto the wave breakers and help each other down to the sand. They rushed towards the foamy edges of the water, each moving so fast that their footprints barely indented the sand.
“Kamari was always faster. That aerodynamic egghead,” said Amadi.
Bioxy giggled and opened the box of food. “Want some?”
“Please.” His focus was drawn beyond the boys, now frolicking in the water. A few kilometres out, nanobots incinerated islands of plastic, the process appearing like fireworks above the sea. Beyond the incandescent light, the sea remained an obstinate grey; it didn’t matter that the sky was deep navy.
“Amadi.”
“Huh?”
Bioxy pointed to the morsel of hamburger floating beside him. He opened his mouth and the nibble went in. “Now you chew,” they said, sarcastically.
Amadi smiled. He was being rude; he had invited Bioxy on this mem-date and now he was too caught up in it. Was this why people said mem-dates were such volatile things, especially with someone he’d only screen-seen for six months.
“Why this mem in particular?” asked Bioxy, allowing two chips to station inside their mouth: a chip for each cheek.
In the water the boys glistened, underpants transparent, their laughter building a wall between the Amadi on the concrete and the Amadi in the sea, dunking his brother below the surface. The Amadi on the concrete was about to reply when his arms began to glitch.
“Something’s wrong,” said Bioxy.
“Must be a loose wire. Wait here.” Amadi pixelated and dissolved, leaving Bioxy with an army of chips suspended in the air, waiting to enter them.
*
All the wires were intact. The problem was more serious than that. His hippotankus had sprung a leak and mem-fluid was flooding one of the chambers.
We’ll have to reschedule. Tank’s busted, typed Amadi.
Damn. I was enjoying you.
From his view of the hippotankus monitor, Amadi watched Bioxy climb over the wave breakers and walk towards the car in the parking lot, bits of food still following them. What were they doing? Didn’t they know it was rude to wander in a mem without the mem-bearers permission?
Where are you going? typed Amadi.
Just want to see something.
I’m gonna turn off.
Just wait.
Amadi had his finger on Eject All Participants. Bioxy was meters away from the pair of feet hanging outside the driver’s window. He knew his mother would soon get up from reading her book and call her sons in from the sea, but what would happen if she saw Bioxy: a chimera with barcodes etched across their body, a human-machine fusion, in a time when chimeras didn’t exist yet? Bioxy was inserting themselves into a timeline they didn’t belong in. This was not like other mems he allowed users to play in. This was his.
It was the sound of his mother calling her boys from the water that prompted Amadi to push Eject before Bioxy got too close to the window.
*
Sorry if I came off too forward. You know, curiosity and all that.
A few hours later, a message from Bioxy scrolled across the kitchen counter. Amadi was too preoccupied with his hippotankus to care about replying. Maybe he wasn’t ready to make new mems yet. New mems seemed to require letting people in, and that always ended in deletions, variations, augmentations—so many that, over time, he’d forget the real reason he fell in love, or yelled, or cried, or lied to someone.
By now his hippotankus had rehearsed every combination of comedy and tragedy from his life story; so much so that very few alternate timelines disturbed or excited him now. Viewing all alternate life stories that could have been made him feel like a grand overseer, even if it was over something as inconsequential as his life.
He knew that most people would disagree with the view that his life was inconsequential because, after all, he was a verified mem-bearer, going viral with his first upload. Sure, mem-bearing was what everyone with a hippotankus did these days; its popularity making the prediction of viral sensations all the more obscure. Everyone’s life was already overexposed; people allowed each other to play inside their memories for a fee—in as nonchalant a fashion as ordering the kettle to make tea. Yet, despite his unexpected fame, Amadi didn’t like to grant interviews. Probing questions annoyed him, especially the ones that led directly to, and through, Kamari.
It was 11 pm. Third rush hour. If he left now, he would be back by 2 and still in time to reboot his hippotankus for the early morning re-mem-bearers to log in and select their favourite Amadi mems to explore. He needed all the online time he could get now that his mems weren’t receiving the traction they used to. That’s the thing when mem-bearing is your living, earned. Content. Content. Content: turn your life inside out, twenty-four-seven. It was what paid for a penthouse in the CBD of Egoli; a price he would pay again.
In fact, when re-mem-bearers played in his lifestory there were few mem-variations where he didn’t sign his name on the dotted line for this exact life. For Amadi, that indicated a level of consistency across possible worlds, the kind he only ever found in himself. After all, wasn’t that what hippotankologists had touted about mem-bearing—that by viewing all variations of one’s lifestory you would be reconciled to the notion that every variation lead inexorably to one, final, life conclusion.
Amadi thought about Bioxy and concluded that screen-seeing wasn’t what it used to be. Screen-See put people through every algorithm imaginable, running its applicants’ neural chemistry through countless simulations and still, people came up bust: unable to form true connections. Maybe monogamy really was extinct; maybe life-long companionship wasn’t needed anymore. A furtive, sentimental part of him wanted to believe the contrary, but the evidence was overwhelming. What had made him pick Bioxy in the first place? Was it because they were so open about their transition to sexlessness? He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was more attracted to them because of it. That, and the possibility of barcode rubbing (which was still taboo in many countries). Barcode rubbing with Bioxy would make for great content, he thought.
Amadi typed what he wanted to wear into the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the city’s skyline. The clothes he had on undressed themselves and rolled off towards the laundry room. He waited for a new pair of pants to snake from his bedroom and up his legs. Soon after, a fresh shirt flapped out the bedroom and clipped onto his torso. Living at this height was the best way to live, the only way, he thought. Those who lived on floors above forty got treated to ClearView: windows able to pierce the dense amalgam glare of city lights and pollution, recreating what the night sky looked like for the earliest of humans—when there was nothing but a fire to stave off an encroaching, suffocating freeze.
When people die their hearts become stars—his mother had said once at dinner, right after their father, Tiamo, had passed. She was fond of relating as much as she knew about the San, her people. She always phrased it like that, her people, as if Kamari and Amadi would never get a chance tobe part of a community that only had a handful of people left who intimately understood their ways. The San were probably right, he thought. If life came here billions of years ago from microorganisms frozen in meteors, slamming into a molten soup of Earth, then why couldn’t the stars be cemeteries for civilizations that existed long gone?
Amadi checked the time on the window. He had to leave now. He instructed his hippotankus to pack itself into its bag and went to stand on the furthest tip of his balcony. The railing retracted and a viscous substance began to cover him, starting at his ankles and crowning his head. Once covered, he stepped off the balcony of the sixtieth floor and descended, at comet speed, towards the pavement. He preferred exiting the skyscraper this way. It meant bumping into less people on the trip down.
*
I hope you’re not upset.
A message from Bioxy appeared in the window of the jewellery shop.
Don’t they get it, thought Amadi, swiping the text off the window. His eyes caught the sparkle of a bin filled with blue-moon diamonds: each stone its own speckled catacomb of azure and silver-pink. His mother used to speak about a time when diamonds were status symbols, when they were extracted from the Earth in the most primitive way. He scoffed to think that the only reason they were mass-produced now was for costume parties.
On the corner, he voice-activated his blur, making sure his hippotankus was floating behind him, and stepped onto the rail-pave that led downtown towards Baartman Square. He began to glide past blurs just like him: opaque bubbles of reality containing individuals who didn’t want to be bothered by strangers. He appreciated people who had the sense to turn their blurs on in public. It was just proper etiquette.
Why had he chosen the rail-pave in the first place? He could have just ordered in a repair guy or paid an errand girl to take the hippotankus for repairs. He hated admitting it, but mother was right: he was an outside kid, always had been. He just wished the outside didn’t come with so many goddamn people. As soon as he thought it, he imagined what his mother would say: we’re nothing without others, my boy. The best mems are co-created. He wasn’t sure he wanted new mems as much as he needed them to maintain his lifestyle. A lifestyle that came with the downside of probers, like Bioxy, who were too intrusive for his liking.
*
Welcome to the Temple of Techuality
Today’s Ntshanga Memorial Key-Note Speaker
is the Enigmatic Professor, Nia Onai.
The Temple of Techuality stood across from the Hippotankus Repair Centre. Amadi was making good time before he saw the neon sign. She’s giving a lecture, at the temple of all places, and she didn’t tell me, he thought. He walked into the temple and turned off his blur. It didn’t take long for strangers to come up and ask him for screen grabs. He tried to be polite.
“Oh my god…are you…oh my god,” said a twenty-something bald man who was directing people into the Holy Sepulcher.
“Yes. Yes I am,” he said, “I’d like to see my mother. Professor Onai.”
“Of course, Mr. Onai, right this way.”
The bald man escorted Amadi into the Holy Sepulcher, through the murmuring mix of blurs and people, up onto the stone stage and through a side door. There, in an ornate wooden rocking chair, sat his mother—hair streaked in rhino-grey and amber, face sagging more than the last time they’d seen one another. Her posture seemed untarnished with age; her feet were square and rooted, with shoulders back and core engaged.
“My boy, you remembered!” Nia got up and hugged Amadi, cueing the bald man to leave the room. Her hug smothered the flame blistering in his chest: it’s not on her, this time.
“Yeah, you know I couldn’t miss it.”
“And here I thought you were so stuck in your mems-bearing that you’d never get out that penthouse,” laughed Nia.
“Is Kamari here?”
“No…they said they’d watch online. So, that’s something.”
“Probably thought I was gonna be here.”
Nia backed away and sat down. “I told you already, I won’t get involved. I’ve tried with you two and that didn’t work.”
“I know. Listen, let me go give this hippotankus in across the road and I’ll be back before you start.”
“Oh.” Nia eyed the machine floating behind Amadi. “We must have a sit down some time to talk about…”
“My future,” He fought the urge to roll his eyes.
“Your present.” Nia had assumed the voice from his childhood, composed yet penetrating.
“Can we do all of that later? I don’t want to be late for your lecture.”
She leant back in her chair, sighing. “Sure. Fix your machine.” Amadi kissed his mother on the cheek, turned on his blur and walked out the way he came.
*
Sitting in line at therepair centre, he watched the news on the monitor suspended in the middle of the room.
Vigilante group, Wens Gratis, has struck again. This time attacking protest blocks in Ennerdale, Orange Farm, and Lenasia. Tonight, they’ve released a video calling for government to reinstate free protests.
Amadi didn’t understand why Wens Gratis fought against something that was clearly beneficial. Protest blocks—areas of unused land designated for protesting—had saved the country millions in damaged infrastructure. And now Wens Gratis wanted to take that away to have people protest anywhere, anyhow. When he was younger, Nia often relayed stories of how people used to block roads, topple monuments, and pour faeces over the faces of old statues. There was something unnerving about those stories, even then. For Amadi, the protest blocks were economical: book your time slot, protest over whatever grievance, exorcise anger through chants, dancing, burning, and then be done with it. It made cathartic sense.
“Amadi Onai,” called the voice in the unblurred cubicle.
He walked in and sat across from a clerk who had a speaker fitted to his throat with wires running out into a machine that hummed beneath the desk. The scanners in Amadi’s armchair read his fingerprints as the clerk began to speak.
“Molo ndingakunceda ngantoni? Hallo, hoe kan ek u help? Mhoro ndingakunatsira sei? Sawubona ngingakusiza kanjani? Hello, how can I help you…” The clerk cycled through several more languages before the system picked up Amadi’s preferred tongue.
“A chamber in my hippotankus has flooded,” said Amadi.
“Please place the machine in the glass container.”
He did as he was told. The container scanned the hippotankus as the clerk angled his head at the schematics on his monitor. “Your childhood mems are flooded. Overused. Too many users allowed to play in them without proper maintenance undertaken. You should have brought your hippotankus in a lot sooner, sir.”
“I know, it’s just—I’m a verified mem-bearer, you might have heard of me.” He waited for the glint of recognition in the clerk’s eyes. Nothing came. “Okay, well, anyway, I earn a living from mem-bearing and, yeah, just haven’t had the time. Can it be fixed tonight? I’ve gotta be online soon. I’ve got loyal re-mem-bearers who are going to log in to play in my mems soon.”
The clerk didn’t answer. He began to doubt whether the clerk had heard him. “We’d have to do a complete reload of your mems. It would mean losing all the mem-variations produced by your re-mem-bearers.”
“You mean there’s no way to save the variations?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Amadi took a moment to consider what he was losing. All those pivotal moments and choices he’d relived in countless ways. Like making sure Tiamo had gone to see his doctor sooner; like taking the time to learn more about the San when he was younger; like choosing not to use Kamari’s transition for his own gain. All those worlds were going to be deleted. He was going to be left with a single narrative, the narrative the hippotankus still verified as the ‘real’ thread. He wondered if he would ever have what it takes to look back into his past, without the safety of an eject button?
“Mr. Amadi,” said the clerk.
“Huh?”
“Would you like us to proceed?”
“Uh, yeah. Save the originals. At all costs.”
“Very well.” The clerk tapped the monitor a few times and the hippotankus levitated off the desk and out of view. “It should take four hours.”
Amadi left the unblurred cubicle and headed for the door.
*
…The San believe that in the First Creation people were indistinguishable from animals. It was only after the Second Creation that homo sapiens assumed a sense of culture and separation. Homo sapiens, once separated, then gave birth to a Third Creation, one constituted at the very moment we carved tools from stone. We have bound this Third Creation to our survival as a species. Lichen to rock. And out of this we’ve fashioned beeping and beaming animals that reflect our expansiveness back to us. These are creatures we hook ourselves up to, creatures we feed, creatures we send into outer space, into the smallest quanta of perceivable reality, into the organelles of our cells, into the depths of the oceans. Our creations have cleaned up our mistakes and given us a fighting chance on this rock that we’ve poisoned with avarice. Yes, we have used them and to some extent they have used us. And now, it seems to me, we are in the midst of a Fourth Creation…
Amadi sat in the pews of the Holy Sepulcher and listened to Nia, walking from one side of the stage to the other. One by one, the people who had their blurs on switched them off: old, young, white, black, brown.
…When anthropologists first discovered my people’s cave paintings, they overlooked anything they did not understand, thinking that whoever painted the unusual figures was too intoxicated or unskilled in the craft. What they did not realize was that drawing elands, hares, snakes, scorpions, and springbuck on rock was more than just paying homage. It was the first medium used to open portals to other worlds. Worlds of the mind. Worlds of the heart. Thresholds crossing back to the first creation, where we leapt from branches and howled our names through teeming rainforests…
Amadi turned his blur off and realized that, by now, no one cared how famous he was. It felt strange to sit amongst people who weren’t hounding him for something; strange to feel the heat of those beside him, even stranger to hear their breathing or smell what fragrance they had on. He took another look around and, there, near the front, was Bioxy, nodding to the words of his mother. Had they followed him here?
…Our portals are a lot different now. Yes, today our portals reach into our minds and pry open what growing old has us forget. We are forced by our own creations to recollect every tiny detail, to upload more of ourselves, gigabyte by gigabyte. Nothing can be forgotten. Everything must be archived. But I want to ask: what does forgetting allow, what space does it give, and can we choose to forget more freely, turning the future into a passage that unbinds us from our pasts. It is daunting, my friends, to have faith that nothing is ever, truly, lost. To know that what’s inside us is boundless, even if it cannot be stored in one place forever…
Nia stopped for a moment, took a sip of water, and looked in the direction of where Amadi was seated.
…I’ve written about this in my book, and I’ll mention it here. When my ancestors danced around the fire for healing, a great potency boiled in their stomachs and contracted their muscles in violent spasms. They induced spontaneous nosebleeds, activating an internal technology—one that took them to the limits of human perception, to the fringes of illness and death. After coming back from their journey inward and upward, they slept on the earth as peacefully as those who live above the fortieth floor of our skyscrapers…
She had hit a soft spot and the crowd was eating it up. Even though no one was looking at him, Amadi felt as if his mother had accused him of something. Of what, he wasn’t sure. He got up in a hurry and shuffled out the Holy Sepulcher, trying not to make eye contact with anyone.
Standing outside the temple, he thought of Kamari. Were they watching mom’s lecture? What did they think about her theory of ‘internal technology,’ and all that crap? Whatever Nia wanted to talk to him about would have to wait; he wasn’t in the mood for a debate.
“Amadi. That you?”
He turned around and saw Bioxy standing at the entrance. “Oh, hey.”
“Nice to see you here.”
“Yeah, well, Professor Onai is my—”
“I know.”
“You’re not—” Amadi stopped. He wanted to make sure that Bioxy wasn’t some crazed re-mem-bearer that had managed to slip into his personal life, but didn’t know how to pose the question without coming off like a douche. Why did he care? This was only the first time they’d met in the flesh.
“Is your hippotankus fixed?” asked Bioxy.
“Almost. Shouldn’t be long now.”
“If you don’t wanna go back inside…I don’t live far from here. I mean, we could go chill at my place and wait till it’s done, if you want.”
The suggestion took him by surprise. “Uhm, I just don’t think—”
“—if it’s about me wandering in your mem, I am really sorry. I’m a big fan of your mother’s work and I guess I wanted. I guess I wanted…more. Something not a usual fan would get.”
Admittedly, he understood Bioxy’s infatuation. If anything had been passed down between Nia and him it was the ability to hold people’s attention. “Okay fine,” said Amadi, “It’s better than going back in there.”
*
Bioxy lived in a face-brick apartment on the twentieth floor of Desmond Tutu Towers. Walking in, Amadi noticed the Isifiso painting hanging on the wall above a table of pot plants. Devil’s Ivy. Spider Lily. Aloe.
“Want a drink?” asked Bioxy, taking off their coat.
Amadi nodded, sitting on the wooden swing next to a couch occupied by books. It was the kind of swing one found in a garden, not indoors. In fact, thought Amadi, the apartment looked like a greenhouse—ferns draped off tables, vines swooping low from the ceiling.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen an Isifiso painting,” he said.
Bioxy handed him a glass of clear liquid. “It’s probably the most expensive thing I own.” The pair sat in silence, sipping, contemplating the eddying abstraction on the canvas. “Would you like to stand in front of it?”
The question made him nervous. What if the painting read him? What if Bioxy took offence and kicked him out? “Can two people stand in front of it at the same time?” he asked.
“Depends. If they want the same things, then, yeah.”
“And if they don’t?”
“The paint won’t settle long enough for the viewer to make out what it is.”
Amadi gulped the clear liquid down, feeling a buzz behind his eyes. “Okay.” He walked over to the table with the pot plants.
“It’ll take a few minutes,” said Bioxy, refilling their glass by the kitchen island.
The painting’s brushstrokes collided in a rhythmic dance, colours mixing and separating, oblique lines penetrating horizontal flourishes, dramatic gestural marks swiping left and smudging right. Paint flowed in from its borders and twisted itself into the shape of two craned necks. The painting considered Amadi standing before it, scanning him from the inside out, comparing the concrete Amadi with traces of him found online, stored in servers around the world. Then, it settled on an image. Bioxy came up behind him as the image came into focus.
“It’s not what you think,” said Amadi, turning away, embarrassed.
Bioxy gently touched his cheek, prompting him to look again.
In the painting, Amadi was rubbing his mouth against the barcodes etched along Bioxy’s groin—inducing flows of electrochemical stimulation that entered him repeatedly. Their faces were awash in a glow that only an ocean, broken by sunlight, could mimic. Was this it, he wondered. The Fourth Creation? Was this what Nia prophesied at her lecture? A sexless imbibing of the other. The final phase where humanity fused with its reflections.
The canvas deteriorated into swirls of paint as soon as he stepped away from it. “I should go,” he said.
“You don’t have to.”
*
Amadi turned off the ClearView of his penthouse windows. He was tired of seeing the night sky as it had been millennia ago. “Play Four Women, Nina Simone,” he said. Speakers, built into the walls, turned on.
My back is strong. Strong enough to take the pain, inflicted again and again.
Nina’s voice lilted through the lounge, circling the hippotankus on the table. He got up to pour another drink, recounting what had happened in Bioxy’s apartment. As he poured, a message from Nia flashed on the monitor:
It was nice to see you, son. Call me sometime.
He couldn’t answer in his current state. He sat down in front of the hippotankus, caressing it, thinking how much of himself lived in its chambers, its wires, bolts.
Between two worlds…I do belong…
Nina’s voice was doing something. He got up and began to sway, thinking about the inexhaustible void between Bioxy’s legs. He wanted to mem-bear about it, wanted to share what he’d done. This new mem could earn enough to pay rent for at least a year. So what if barcode-rubbing was taboo. People can’t help but transgress. He knew that as long as there was money to be made, and differences to be defended, there would be markets for the strange, the illicit, the breaking of codes. Why else had re-mem-bearing become such a world-wide phenomenon other than the fact that people craved being inside different skins. For it was only in a different skin, virtually separated from oneself, that anyone could live recklessly abandoned.
…whose little girl am I? Anyone who has money to buy.
Nina’s voice cracked and writhed as the base guitar mended the silences. Amadi pulled up the message thread between Kamari and him on the glass countertop of the lounge table. The last time they spoke he had apologized, again, for mem-bearing about Kamari’s transition to chimera’hood. He tried to make Kamari understand that he was young, that he had no idea how famous he’d get because of it. That was a year and a half ago and still, Kamari hadn’t replied.
I’ll kill the first mother I see…my life has been rough!
Amadi hooked himself to his hippotankus and dissipated into the machine.
*
The beach sand warmed Amadi’s toes. The boys in the sea splashed water in each other’s faces, laughing. It was the most fun they had had since Tiamo’s passing. When Tiamo had passed, Nia had woken them up in the middle of the night and driven them out of the city, down to see the ocean at sunrise for the first time. Amadi didn’t remember much about his father; most of his mems featured Tiamo disappearing behind metal doors to work on his latest invention—a machine that would become a worldwide phenomenon, more addictive than any social tech that had come before it. A tech that would later sustain Amadi’s lavish lifestyle.
He walked into the sea till it reached his thighs. The boys didn’t recognize him; he was just another adult, wading. It wasn’t long before Nia called her sons out of the water. He wanted to say something to the Amadi frolicking in his wet underpants, snot dripping from his left nostril. Something that could alter the course of a life.
Nothing came. Nothing, save the waves breaking upon Amadi’s back, as his family got into the car and glided out of the parking lot, turning the red lines white.
