A Monsoon of Screams

Jan parks the car in the basement parking, and after checking that there’s no one, we place my brother in the trunk. When I arrive at my office building, Miriam is already tucked into her desk. The modern design open-office plan is buzzing with real estate staff, the glassy walls plastered with digital notices from the property market. Everyone hushes, lowers their heads, their gazes slide and slip, following my every step. Can they tell I did something? Did Moremi’s ghost leave a mark on me? Jan’s wearing his suit jacket to cover the blots of blood on the white of his shirt. A sheen of sweat eclipses our skin, our rabid eyes barely masked by our pretense of normalcy. At least my black overcoat covers the blood on my pants and top, the hood concealing the gristly crust of blood in my braids. So I steady my voice when I ask Miriam, “What’s going on?”

“They found a body,” she whispers. “It’s all over the news.”

The floor, cold. My legs. I can’t feel my legs.

“Are you okay?” Miriam asks. Jan’s by my side, trying to hoist me up. My handbag lies on its side by my legs. I’m on the floor, back against the reception desk.

“What didn’t you mean to do, love?” Miriam asks, which confuses me until I catch my mouth blabbering, “I didn’t mean to.”

“Turn that down, will you? A bit early to be a downer with such news,” Miriam says to someone. I crane my neck. One of my employees, Gwen, approaches the wall paneled with the news channel.

“Wait, don’t,” I blurt. “Turn it up.”

He shrugs, presses the side of the wall, and the reporter’s voice washes over the room. “Earlier this morning, a young woman’s battered body was discovered by two joggers in New Naledi and rushed to hospital.”

My blood pressure normalizes, and I exhale. It’s not our victim’s body, far from the suburbs of New Naledi.

The reporter continues, “Doctors were shocked to discover, through the ID Consciousness scan, that her consciousness matched identity records of convict Lauren Molaodi, incarcerated two years ago, whose mind should have been uploaded to Crypt Prison as claimed by her records.” Jan and I stare at each other with widened eyes. “Upon reporting their findings to the police department, a High Court representative receiving medical care in the same unit recorded allegations made by the young woman. The victim claims to have escaped torture from a makeshift jailhouse in the police department and alleges that, unbeknownst to the public, other prisoners are unlawfully pitted against each other under inhumane experiments to advance the AI CBE. Military officers were seen hours later securing the woman—”

I’m not listening anymore. Advancing the CBE to do what? What would that mean for me and Jan? How—no, why are they torturing prisoners whose bodies should have been donated to those on the waiting list? If I’m caught, what will the police do to me? All of this to eradicate crime completely? The secrecy suffocates me. Even if I asked my husband, he’d never reveal anything to me.

My neck is sore. My fingers come across the throbbing microchip, escalating to hot-plate stove temperatures. Is it the stress? It feels familiar, the memory of the pain. A desperate itch runs through my body. I rise as Miriam beckons me to a meeting with the quantity surveyor.

“I’m dealing with an urgent matter. Cancel all my meetings,” I say over my shoulder as Jan and I wind into the AUTHORIZED ACCESS entry, through a dim, cold hallway into our project archives, storage of every project’s research my firm has done. Exclusive to my firm and highly confidential, it is set like a library with aisles and aisles of onyx-black server units, standing tall like shelves, an industrial look with intricate architectural design.

Jan’s brows collect sweat. “I hope we find helpful answers. Each thing we discover seems to make this city appear murkier and murkier, and we are swimming further into its dark. Why torture prisoners when the prison is built to be their virtual hell? I’m almost afraid to find the police authority’s motives. How does this work?”

“What’s contained here is only the voice of the mind, a huge storage of recordings,” I say. “We can interrogate them only to the extent of how far they lived before they were caught and incarcerated.”

The digital files are arranged alphabetically on a slim drive, each requiring only the head staff’s biometric scan to access them. I run past the rows, then spin into row C, looking for Crypt Prison files. I slow down, wiping sweat from my forehead. Holding on to the black framing of the servers, I press my thumb against the scanner, widen my eyes for a biometric scan. It glows green, authorization accepted. A holographic tray folds out and hovers at eye level like a slim plasma screen, translucent, with sleek electric blue lines. I shuffle through the menu with my hands. Each category is tagged according to the prisoners’ crimes. I pick “homicide” with a list of alphabetically arranged names. I pick a random name, Lingani Tshekiso, and a short summary follows, glowing under the fluorescent lights:

On the morning of Saturday at 4:30 a.m., a 33-year-old man, Lingani Tshekiso, handed himself in at Borakanelo Police Station and confessed to murdering eleven people, pleading that they save his son. His son was found battered and dismembered in a locked closet at the family home in Moshupa. Defensive wounds on his arms were evidence of him fending off his attacker, but there were no signs of forced entry, no bloody fingerprints on the doorknob.

There’s a ►sign next to the summary, and I press it. Sound crackles, and his face appears, pockmarked with pimples and scars. “A warning call to a relative won’t stop them,” the beady-eyed serial killer, Lingani Tshekiso, says, grief thick in his mind-voice. “Try staying in a room with no doors or windows—they will still get inside. Them, the victims who refuse to die.” He heaves a breath, and my skin has me hemmed in as I remember Moremi cornering me in Jan’s office, the scalding imprint of her hand on my shoulder blade, the sharp explosion of pain as she cracked my head against the concrete floor of the basement parking, imagining the havoc of her terrorism if ever we were locked in a room together.

I close my arms around myself as Tshekiso continues, “The killing started in the closet and ended in the closet. The victim I killed ended up killing my son. My heir.”

Jan shakes his head and reads the summary: “‘Reports reveal the suspect was under the influence of drugs and suffering from hallucinations as he claimed to being chased by dead people who were forcing him to kill. But preliminary investigations dispute his claims, revealing that the suspect went on an eighteen-hour killing spree after learning that his microchip wasn’t working. The following morning, with the assistance of the Sunday chemicals, detectives were led to the shallow graves of the suspect’s eleven deceased victims located in Mochudi Village.”

I pace back and forth, burning with questions. “Hallucinations?” I say, shocked. “B-b-but we’re not hallucinating Moremi. I felt her. She attacked my father. She attacked you. This is not a hallucination.”

“His microchip failed, like yours,” Jan says, pale. “It can’t be a coincidence.” He continues reading the report: “‘The suspect was charged for the murders of the eleven victims and his son. The severity of the crime prompted the need for the daily AI microchip assessments, which were nonexistent prior to the case; this stringent surveillance measure became significant in catching crimes that went undetected.’”

“So that’s how the morning assessments came into place?” I say. “But my morning assessment failed to detect last night’s crime.” I direct my question to Tshekiso’s hologram. “Why do the victims return as revenge-seeking ghosts?”

Tshekiso says, “Access denied.”

Jan raises his hands. “What the fuck?”

“If a suspect reports themselves, will the ghosts stop the killing?” I ask.

Tshekiso says, “Access denied.”

“No, no, no!” I punch my fist through the hologram. “Give me something, for fuck’s sake! How do you stop them?”

Tshekiso: “Access denied.”

“Why are the police torturing prisoners?” I ask.

“Access denied,” Tshekiso says.

I crouch down, press my forehead into my knees, and muffle my screams. If you walk away from me, someone else will die, Moremi’s voice taunts me. My AI assessment didn’t reveal me. My husband couldn’t smell the death on my skin. My car didn’t stop the accident from happening. Moremi’s body was infiltrated and hacked by a microchip. And now the police are possibly torturing prisoners with a secret motive?

I look up, staring at the rise and fall of the sound waves as he speaks. “I am innocent.”

Tshekiso’s gruff voice echoes through the room—he sounds as if he’s embarrassed. “I’m innocent, please. I tried stopping him, the victim, from . . . sodomizing my relatives. I tried, but I was too late in confessing to the police. Too late.” He breaks into sobs, and the recording ends. I grimace. Tshekiso sodomized his victims. Moremi mentioned she kills my family the same way Jan and I killed her. So it has to be that Tshekiso’s victim sodomized his relatives only because Tshekiso committed that very act to the victim. God!

I slap and punch the hologram, but my hand skims through it. Moremi’s hellbent on killing my family. She’s only offered me a delay to find her vital information regarding her microchip. That’s my only way to stop her, to save my family.

“Let’s listen to the other recordings,” Jan says in a panic, scrolling through names. But we only find similar accounts: Convicts pleading their innocence. Investigations claiming the killers’ theories are hallucinations and drug-related crimes.

I shove the screen onto its shelf. “How the hell will I persuade her to stop?”

The silence gathers up around me like a tornado. I take a deep breath. When I release it, a sob erupts from my lips. I tighten my fist and press it against my teeth to shut myself up.

Jan paces back and forth, hands clenched into fists. He shakes his vehemently. Focuses his eyes intensely on mine. “Something’s wrong. This was a bit too easy for us, don’t you think? Too convenient that we find exactly what we’re looking for in the first report.”

“Bloody bliksem, Jan. What could be so bad about having it easy in this kak mess?” I whine.

“Easy things tend to camouflage shitty things.”

The words crawl along my spine and I feel so, so cold. I wrap my arms around myself. No, I don’t want to think how worse this might get. I need to focus on the most imminent problem.

My wristwatch strikes 6:03 p.m. “We only have an hour left to drive across the city to the grave site, excavate her body to use her finger to unlock her quantum computer, read her microchip, and make it to the airport before she gets to Mama.”

“That’s not enough time,” Jan says.

“If I can get to my mother, I can keep changing her location so Moremi doesn’t touch her. That will certainly pause the murders.”

“I thought you said she warned you not to manipulate her conditions.”

“I’m only buying time so I can find out who put this microchip in her,” I say. “I don’t exactly have a way to negotiate. She’s not the negotiating type.”

A sound screeches from my phone. Gwyneth Kgotso, Estate Awards Committee. Fuck. I swipe across the screen. The hologram extracts from the phone, hovers above me, obscures my identity, but displays her form: chubby face, bob-cut braids, dark-skinned.

“Dumêla, mma,” she says: Hello, ma’am. “I’m so glad I could reach you this morning. Congratulations again! We admire the humanitarian work you’ve done for communities locally and worldwide.”

I perfect a smile, feel bile fill my mouth, watching Jan as he stands behind her. “Thank you. Is there a problem?”

“Well, how do I put this? The documents you submitted were inconclusive, and as per our regulations, the awardees are required to undergo forensic evaluation.”

“I did. A month ago.”

“We know, but we need further assurance, so we sent in a request to the police department to redo and expedite your forensic evaluation,” she says, “which will qualify you for the award.”

“Qualify me?” I chew my lower lip. “So . . . if my evaluation results determine me as a criminal, you will disqualify me, and someone else will receive the award?”

“Unfortunately, yes. This is not to offend you, but after last year’s mayhem of awarding to a citizen who subsequently failed her evaluation, we’ve had to review our selection process and criteria.” She brushes her braids aside. “Awarding a professional who is criminally prone is really against our ethos and principles. We want to avoid the same mistake recurring. But we’re not worried. You wouldn’t hurt a fly—you’ll ace the evaluation. We believe in you.” The way she adds the latter is overly enthusiastic and desperate. I wouldn’t hurt a fly, but I can kill someone.

I swallow. “Yes, I understand.” My mind slips elsewhere. “We actually have a family matter . . . and I’d like to forfeit the award.”

Her face dissolves into a horrified expression. “Well, I don’t think we can allow that. Even if we did, we’d still have to process the forensic evaluation. Such a request is a cause for concern. This is an award that not only benefits you but all the women out there.”

I’d rather not mention that my previous evaluation took days, and if I act otherwise, it’ll be suspicious.

“No one is free from this analysis, not even the politicians, not the president, nor God.” She chuckles at her joke. Cold dread trickles through my veins, not blood, but fear, torpid fear flows to my heart. “We tried reaching you last night, and instead, we caught your husband,” she continues. “Such a kind man—he did us the favor of quickly arranging for your forensic evaluation to be conducted tonight.”

Jan’s eyes widen. He doubles over.

“Tonight?” My nerves tighten, and I scrape my nails against my palms. That bastard.

“At 10:00 p.m. Isn’t that amazing?” She beams.

I stretch out my lips into what I hope is a convincing smile. “I’ll be there. I have to go. My meeting just arrived.”

I hang up before she says goodbye; the hologram disappears in a flash. I hurl the phone aside. “That bastard. Why didn’t he say anything?” I shout. I sink my head into my hands. This leaves me with only about four hours to fix this fuck-up. Would I even be able to rig the system, hide the body? I chew on my nail, try to think of a way to fix this without it sullying my family’s image, my daughter, my reputation. My reputation is the legacy I want to leave her. Think. Think. I wish I could use my family name to my advantage to get out of this mess. My family is wealthy, but their power has no political affiliations that they can benefit from, like the Koshal family.

I start rambling. “If I die, my husband gets a million from insurance, a billion worth of my estate which is completely tied in my inheritance, and my shares in the company—no, I need to scrap that. Change the will, leave it all to my daughter until she’s of age; he’ll be her proxy until she’s eighteen. If I die, would the police force really have a record that I’m a criminal? Unless . . . I mean, without my body, there is no corpse to analyze. I’d have to completely disappear. To make certain that my body doesn’t appear on the radar, I’d have to be in it, alive, always taking it far, far away. But my baby. Could I just leave her? Leave her alone with him? To grow up without me? Taking her with me would be considered kidnapping. And even if I kill myself, I’m no longer eligible for a body in this lifespan.”

“Hey, hey,” Jan says, holding me in place. “We have four hours. Four to figure it out.”

The project archive feels like my jail cell. Small. Tight. I stagger out into the hallway, open the windows, and wind screeches in. The faint scent of rain and mud enter. The smell of last night. I can’t escape. I just dumped her body. A woman. A woman like me, who probably has a boyfriend or someone looking for her. Or a mother. Or a father. Or a child.

“Every action we make is a memory stained into our mind,” I say. “We’re basically our own CCTV, recording our own crimes. If I undergo the forensic evaluation’s simulation, it will snitch. I thought I escaped it for twelve months. If the microchip assessment was a walk in the park, this will be a ride to hell. There is no way out of this, Jan.”

Jan stands, paralyzed by the news. I could pull the microchip. Shut myself down. The noise in my ears, a ringing sound, rises, rises, rises, swallowing me, revealing the threatening order of Moremi’s killing spree because the truth is:

“She’s picking randomly who to kill next,” I whisper, and Jan looks up at me with furrowed brows. “This only makes it worse: I can’t predict who she’ll go for next.”

I scramble about, grabbing my handbag and coat. I’m running out of time. I dig my nails into my palm. Take deep breaths. Hyperventilate. Walk back and forth. Close my eyes. The room shakes. A monsoon of screams and insanity ravages the air. Last night’s drugs. The murder. The shock. My body is breaking. I feel my skin tear, my consciousness splatter as vast as a constellation of stars. I expect to wake with Serati Zwebathu peering down at me, smirking. I’m whole again, but not so whole, standing inside my body like there are a million of me unable to escape the skin and bone of me.