She’s a kid in a candy store, a bright shiny rand in her hand. It won’t buy much, but mulling all the options is half the fun of it. She could use the spark to perform some miracles, gain some believers, reinvest. But that’s a long process, and she’s already started to detect the presence of another, the one Mr. Tau will be sending to replace her. Sydney may be an old battery, but she’s still got a charge. What she needs is a plan, something impressive and unprecedented to get the masses behind her. These humans, they don’t believe in anything anymore, besides capitalism, of course. Times are good, people are thriving, sickness has been eradicated, and machines do all the menial work. There hasn’t been a real war in decades, and the only place oppression and injustice are found is in the dictionary.
It’s merely a fa?ade, sweet delusions of happiness despite their mediocrity. How can they know true pleasure without pain? Happiness without suffering? Basos and ire, each incomplete without the other. She will show them the truth, and in return, she’ll be exalted once again, able to crush Mr. Tau’s new protégée before she learns to spread her wings. Sydney closes her eyes, concentrates on the spark within her, and coddles it like a smoldering ember trying to become a campfire. It grows, and her mind spreads out infinitely into a state of transcendence, omniscient for the briefest of moments, seeing each and every person’s actions, thoughts, desires. As her mind whips through a set of infinite futures, something odd catches her eye: a crab and a dolphin stretched upon human forms. Had it been one or the other, she might have just dismissed the vision, but both together could mean only one thing. She pulls the vision thread tight and braces against the current of possibilities to home directly onto this one. There’s a peacock now. And a stealthy rat, too. Haw, she laughs to herself. It’s been a while, but every hundred years or so, she witnesses hallucinations like this. Someone’s scammed the afterlife again and brought back its bounties, opening those simple human minds up to the true potential trapped inside them, if only for a fleeting moment. A spark. But a spark is nothing without proper kindling.
Now humankind is finally coming into its own, bending and stretching genes in the manner of gods. It was only a matter of time before they muddled their way into bending the exact right genes to reveal that they were gods. Those genes, gone dry and brittle from lack of use, are just begging for an open flame.
Sydney claws forward in time, desperate to see more. It’s not so difficult looking into the future. It’s the looking away that’s the real bitch. She’s only seen a couple weeks out, when the emptiness snaps her back with a vengeance. The spark is gone, and she wails out in agony, collapsing to the floor tacky with Mr. Gnoto’s blood.
Through the pain, she smiles. Her vision has equipped her with enough knowledge to plunge South Africa into a darkness not seen since the days of apartheid. If that’s what it’ll take to get these humans to believe in something, it’s what she’ll have to do.
And best of all, she can do it without even being late to work.
Sydney doesn’t need her powers to convince Isaac Haskins to swap janitorial overseer duties with her, just a chocolate bar, a pack of smokes, and a suggestive smile. He swipes her into the third floor of ZenGen Industries—not one of the sublevel genetic engineering labs where security’s so tight that even low-level overseer jobs require rigorous, demeaning background checks—but there’s enough surveillance here that she’ll need to watch her step. It’s here, on the third floor, that Sydney sees the Coloured woman from her vision: Asemahle Wells. She’s on the other side of a thick sheet of glass, tending to six dik-diks, busy meandering and scratching up the walls of their enclosure with their tiny horns, oddly disinterested in one another. Asemahle’s in an environmental suit, taking blood samples when she gets the call. Sydney can’t hear the conversation, but she already knows what they’re saying. The man on the other end is telling Asemahle that Councilman Stoker has given him permission to look into a viral sterilization project and asks her to send all the data she’s gathered so far. She tells him the transmission phase of the test has gone well, and all six dik-diks are infected. Sydney feels their anxiety, knowing they’ve gone behind Stoker’s back, but he’ll never need to know. Come Monday, the six dik-diks will have been euthanized, and the real trials can be started, including the one that will test for dik-dik-to-human transmission. The possibility is negligible, at least it was when administered to the deer population in the States. And in fact, Sydney knows those tests will all come out negative for interspecies transference, no detectable sign of infection in humans.
Detectable being the key word.
Asemahle turns and catches Sydney staring through the glass. Sydney immediately drops her eyes and corrals the industrial delta bot emptying trash bins. She’s got a long shift in front of her and can’t afford to linger. Before Sydney presses on, she gives the slightest flick of her index finger, willing a slit into the fabric of Asemahle’s environmental suit. It’s a small slit, right under the arm and along the seam so that there’s minimal chance it’ll be noticed by human eyes. But it’s like a twelve-lane expressway for an errant dik-dik virus.
Part II
Chapter 9
Muzi
Muzi watches the festivities from a plastic lawn chair, an ice pack pressed snugly against his crotch and a comforting blanket draped over his shoulders. Papa Fuzz carves up a side of goat, expertly hacking meat from bone, not a bit bothered that it was once a living thing. Muzi’s little cousins, four girls, run around shrilling with streamers in the color of Papa Fuzz’s clan. His mother and aunts catch up over wine, except Aunt Lindi who’s still nursing Brandon, though he’s nearly two years old. Her husband didn’t care a lick about Xhosa traditions, and so Brandon had been spared the first name long enough to choke an elephant and lost his foreskin under the supervision of a real doctor.
Muzi grimaces. He shouldn’t think like that. Yeah, he’s still a little bitter, but Mr. Sohobese was swift and accurate, and twice he was kind enough to bury his attention into cleaning his spear while Muzi battled back the tears—of fear and uncertainty beforehand, and a dizzying mix of pride and pain afterward.