THE CARTHAGION
The sharp scent of the cordite filled the boy’s nostrils. He was hunkered down, two brown scabby knees on either side of his face, and tense with concentration. The tip of his tongue poked through his cracked lips as he struck the flint again and again, willing the dry grass to ignite.
“Come on,” he pleaded, and though his voice was not yet broken, it had a hard edge. The small pile of dry twigs had caught light twice that evening, but had gone out each time, leaving only blackened, curled shapes between the boy’s dirty feet. He rearranged the sticks for the umpteenth time and shoved the bits of grass and leaves between the small strips of bark.
“Ag man, come on!” the boy said, getting more frustrated, “you blêrrie schtupit thing!” His voice was beginning to wobble. This was his first night doing guard duty on his uncle’s farm—Jakkelsplig they called it. He wasn’t alone. Kobus would be there too, but Kobus had asked him to make the fire while he caught something for dinner. Now the fire wasn’t ready and he had been crouched here for ages and he felt so useless. He was twelve years old and couldn’t even make a dumb fire.
“Howzit going there, boytjie?” Kobus’s voice startled Jan, and he turned to see Kobus.
His half-cousin was more than twice his age, with a thick ginger beard, and a veld hat on his head. He towered over Jan, and had a small blue duiker slung over his shoulder.
“It’s fine, I’m doing it.” Jan struck the two pieces of flint together, but rather half-heartedly this time.
“Never mind, boy, I’ll do it for you.” Kobus gently removed the two stones from the boy’s hands. He struck once, twice. Soon there was a pile of glowing coals in the small circle of stones, with a haunch of venison roasting on the grill above it.
Kobus ruffled Jan’s hair as he sat on a tree stump near the fire. “Moenie worry nie, boy. One day you’ll get the hang of it.” Kobus chuckled while he drew on his long-stemmed pipe, leaned back, and stretched out his long legs. He looked up, and indicating with his pipe at the sky, said, “Isn’t it beautiful? Look, there’s Orion with his belt, and there quite close are the Seven Sisters, also you can see Taurus’s horns. And if—” He grunted then turned to look behind him. “If you look that side, you can see the Southern Cross. Look, over there.”
As he lay on his back staring up at the inky night sky, Jan had the peculiar sensation that the world had tipped forward, and it was he who lay suspended above the Milky Way. Whole constellations stood out in relief; tiny stars seeming to grow bigger and smaller as Jan glimpsed them from the corner of his eye—stars that were actually twinkling. The night breeze ruffled his hair. He breathed in the smell of the roasting meat, and listened for the kriek kriek of the crickets nearby.
Jan closed his eyes, and for an instant completely forgot his script, and sighed “God, it’s like the one thing I really I miss, you know. The sky.” The night seemed to go very still. A small buzzing came from the implant in Jan’s right ear, but before it could get any louder, he stammered: “I-I mean, when I have to go to school, you know in the term time, they don’t let us out of the koshuis much. I hardly ever see the sky.”
There was a small pause then the breeze shifted and the crickets sang. Jan turned slightly to catch Kobus’s eye. His complexion darkened, and his eyes were black with anger. He stared at Jan, who stared back, his mind racing.
“U-um, Kobus, please tell me that story again? You know, that story where you killed a lion that one time? Please?”
Kobus was still for a moment then his face relaxed somewhat. He didn’t look happy but he didn’t look murderous either.
He turned to look into the darkness, pulled on his pipe and let out a long curl of blue smoke. The fire sparked and sent a glowing red ember zig-zagging up into the darkness. The meat smelled as if it was burning. A moment passed.
“Fine,” said Kobus. “You get that steak off the fire and I will tell you the story while we eat.”
Jan scuttled towards his canvas backpack, where he removed two yellow enamel plates and two steak knives. Deftly he cut the meat into halves and handed the larger piece to Kobus. He took his plate back to the small stone on which he had been sitting. Kobus took his plate without thanks, and between bites of slightly charred flesh, began his tale.
“The year was nineteen eighty-seven. I was a young lad in the Sixth Battalion, stationed not far from here, at Madimbo, two hundred kilometres north of Massina in the middle of bloody nowhere. Very close to place where the three borders, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa join. There were two of us standing guard…” Kobus’s voice grew softer and more gruff as he spoke.
Jan leaned forward, his hands clasped around his knees, and his gaze fixed on his half-cousin. Gradually, his heart rate began to slow down, and the utter terror that had gripped him moments before began to subside.
It wasn’t just that he had nearly ruined the session; it was that there were actual physical dangers of having a client turn against one, especially when they had chosen an alpha male, prototype 2.1 to embody. The AL-M pr2.1 was a particularly aggressive model, with a military background and a penchant for hunting. Jan hardly listened while Kobus told the story of how a lion had crept into the tent of his buddy, and had tried to drag him out by the boots. This would be the sixty-third time he had heard this story, so he didn’t really have to concentrate too hard on the appropriate interjections. A couple of “oohs” and “jislaaiks!” at appropriate moments was all it took for Kobus to get completely carried away with his tale.
“…and then Frikkie Marais grabbed the blêrrie thing by its tail, what a doos! It turned on him and with a mighty roar, sprang on to the oke’s back. But luckily Fossie and Piet were there as well so all together we…” Kobus was totally absorbed in the telling of his exploits, the script deviation seemingly forgotten.
It was just hard sometimes. Jan did miss the sky. The only time he saw it—the only time any of them saw it—was during these sessions, and no matter how rigorous the training, sometimes looking up at the vastness of the universe was just…well, just overwhelming.
It was a mark of his training that he thought of himself as “he” during these sessions, because Jan was only one of the characters Bella inhabited.
“So, anyway, we soon put that mangy cat out of its misery, and do you know, to this day, I still have the skin upstairs in my pa’s attic. It used to live on the hall floor but Ma got too freaked out by it. She said it looked at her funny.” Kobus chuckled. He stood, stretched and took his sleeping bag out of his backpack. “Here you go my boy, you sleep first and I’ll keep an eye out for the jackals. Goodnight.”
Jan quickly brushed his teeth with water from an enamel mug, pissed on the fire and crawled into the sleeping bag. As his eyes closed, he slipped momentarily into unconsciousness until—
“Oh shit Bella, you are in like, deep, deep trouble!” Debulon’s voice was the first thing that shrieked into her ear. The feeling of disassociating was always disorienting and Deb’s voice was not helping. Bella sat up on the white table. Her muscles ached, and she ran a hand over her legs to ease the cramps. Her techie stood over her, holding up a square of white cloth to cover her body. The company preferred their characters to associate in the nude; there was less restriction of movement, apparently.
“Idiot.” Bella snarled at Deb as she snatched the cloth from his robotic hand and took a deep breath. Debulon was AI, and a rather exasperating trait for scandal and gossip mongering had been built into his personality. He was annoying, but completely harmless. The clear, smooth voice that now spoke directly into her ear however, wasn’t.
“BelPascione, please come to my cubicle. As soon as possible. Thank you.”
Bella zipped up her regulation shell suit and placed her identity clip reading BelPascione345 on the upper left pocket. She ran her fingers through her hair to compose herself and checked her face in the small mirror inset into her locker’s door panel. The panel slid back into place as she turned away, melting back into a wall of hundreds of similar storage units.
As she turned into the corridor that led away from the tech rooms, the light pulsed slightly ahead of her, drawing her forward through the labyrinth. She had no choice but to follow, or be left in complete darkness. The director didn’t like to be kept waiting.
As Bella travelled the corridors, she caught glimpses of the embedded holographs displaying the latest citizen directives. A wall flickered with the message: “The Carthagion! It’s the only way!” It seemed somebody had come up with a new slogan for the latest placatory campaign. The illumination mechanism didn’t allow for pauses, so Bella was forced to continue on her way. She felt slightly nauseous as she travelled the twisting passages. There was such a disconnection between the world she inhabited as Jan, and the reality of the underground city. Sometimes she wished she could stay above ground, but knew that it wasn’t a possibility. Not for a few thousand years at least.
As she approached the director’s cubicle, Bella went over the three main tenets of her training in preparation for the meeting: Number one, always remain on script. No matter what happens, it is vital. Number two, always remain within the designated playing area, and number three, never, ever contradict the client.
I only broke one of those rules. And it was such a small slip that I am sure Kobus probably didn’t even notice. Even as she told herself that, she knew it was a lie. She had seen his expression; he had known exactly what had happened.
Bella arrived at the cubicle threshold slightly out of breath. She paused. The transition from the cramped corridor of the Carthagion into the vast expanse of the cubicle was always a little disconcerting. The room was enormous, long white walls, stretching away from the door, and at the end of the room, was a desk, where a small, neat man was seated. The smooth voice again spoke through Bella’s implant, “Come closer, BelPascione” His mouth did not move. She moved closer.
The man seated at the desk didn’t look up.
“Ignore him,” said the voice. “He is busy at the moment and doesn’t wish to be disturbed. You will talk with me.”
Bella nodded hastily, recognising the voice of the supreme director.
She stammered: “As you wish, madam director.”
“Do you know why you are here?”
Bella considered denying what she had done, but knew it was ultimately futile. “Uh… yes.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I… Uh, I went off script. I said something I shouldn’t have?”
“Exactly. Tell me, BelPascione, why is it that the first rule of your training is to never deviate off script?”
Bella opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came. Why? She had never thought about why before. It had been an order, direct and simple, and always unquestioned.
“Uh… I don’t know why, madam director.” Bella was beginning to feel nauseous. The circulated air of the Carthagion was tinged faintly with the smell of roses. It was cloying.
“Repeat that please.”
“I don’t know, madam director.”
“Perhaps if I explained it to you, you may understand the gravity of the situation?” The voice spoke softly, intimately into Bella’s ear, and a shudder, of either pleasure or disgust, she couldn’t quite tell, ran down Bella’s spine.
“Yes please.” Bella’s voice came as a whisper.
There was a soft whooshing, and as Bella turned, one of the white walls of the cubicle lit up as the room dimmed behind her. On the wall was displayed a series of blue and yellow interconnecting dots, arranged in a hexagonal formation, small beams of light connecting each one to another.
The speaker said, “What do you see?”
“The Pantetra, madam director.”
“Explain.”
Bella, squirmed. She hated this. She felt like a child, being asked to explain her first lessons back to a grim, unsmiling teacher.
“The Pantetra is at the heart of the Carthagion. It is what makes our company work, and it is the living mechanism by which we fulfil our function,” Bella intoned in a sing-song lilt.
“Yes, but what is it?”
Bella paused. She had just said hadn’t she? “Um… the Pantetra is the heart of…” She faltered. The silence grew. Bella had never been asked these questions before. What was going on? She was starting to feel rebellious; if she was going to be punished for her mistake why didn’t they just get it over and done with?
The madam director started again, as smooth and as calm as before, but Bella thought she detected a hint of impatience beneath the rounded vowels.
“Each blue dot that you see represents the mind of a client. Each yellow dot is the mind of an associate, such as yourself, BelPascione. The particular blue dot that you were connected to in your last session belongs to this man.”
A smooth, handsome face appeared on the wall. He was a well-known politician, a man renowned for his strong views on quelling the violent outbreaks in the underground city. Bella knew his face well. His name was Endwald Grobler.
Her breath caught. She had always hidden her background from the Carthagion. She had been recruited at a young age, and had lied on countless forms and in the evaluation tests, because one of the excluding factors was a childhood trauma of any kind. She had never told anyone who had murdered her parents, let alone that they had been killed. This is who had been inside the mind of Kobus.
“Tell me, BelPascione, why do you think the session terminates exactly at the point when the boy known as Jan closes his eyes?”
Bella swallowed hard, trying to control her panic. “Um. Because he falls asleep?”
“Well, that is what you have always believed, but the truth is that the real Jan was brutally murdered by the real Kobus, stabbed over one hundred times with a hunting dagger, and decapitated. We always pull you out moments before, but we leave the client there. Can you imagine why?”
Bella started to shake even harder. She knew why. So that whoever was inside Kobus could do whatever he liked in the safe space of the session. As this man grew in political power, so did his predilections for violence.
“We found that in our research, the memories of a certain type of man living at a particular age were so violent, so devoid of feelings, that they suited our purpose absolutely. Here, below what used to be known as South Africa, we resourced a particularly brutal section of history. Many of these men who returned from the border wars were so traumatised by what they had seen and done that they were quite psychotic. It serves our purpose well.”
Wait. Memories? Bella had always believed that these sessions were VR, created by computers, fiction.
“Memories?” she said.
“Well, technically, yes. More like time travel. Dr Minnaar is rather good at inserting the minds of the clients into the subjects, leaving two consciousnesses, but only one awareness. It’s astonishing, really. The client pays handsomely for this outlet, this moment of release, and we cannot afford to lose him nor you. So do you understand the danger now?”
The madam director fell silent. The man at the white desk still hadn’t looked up at Bella; she was completely unimportant to him. It was unnerving being interrogated by a woman who wasn’t there, yet ignored by a man who was. Bella knew it was deliberate. She wasn’t a part of the company in order to be comfortable; she was here to do a job.
The information she had been given was a lot to comprehend all at once. Every time Bella associated, she was putting her life, her mind in danger, and that if she wasn’t pulled out in time, she would be erased from this world. She also understood something else. That little, snotty barefoot Jan was real, forced to play out his horrific end over and over to entertain this disgusting brute of a man, and the Carthagion was a willing participant in this unspeakable act of violence.
“You may go,” the madam director dismissed her.
Bella turned and ran from the cubicle, down the corridor, the pulsing light following her as she tried to escape from what she had just learned. She put her wrist to her mouth. “Deb?” She spoke into her transmitter. “Deb! Are you receiving?”
There was slight sigh. “Oh it’s you. What do you want?”
“Deb, I’m sorry I called you an idiot. You’re not an idiot.”
Bella heard a slight sniff.
“Deb? You’re not an idiot. You are the best AI techie a gal could wish for and I love you with all my heart and you’re amazing.”
“Ha. Now you’re just being silly.” Bella could hear that he was mollified. “All right, what do you need?”
It had been two months since Bella had been called in front of the director. In that time, Bella had behaved impeccably in all her associations, sticking perfectly to her scripts. But she had been waiting, and now it was time. Debulon had intercepted the Pantetra transcript and had seen that Endwald Grobler had booked a session.
Bella once again lay on the white table in her session room.
She said: “Ready.”
Debulon pressed a button on the left side of the table at the same time as he placed one robotic finger on her temple. He whispered, “Good luck.”
She wasn’t sure if this was the best plan in the world, but it was all she could think of. She no longer could bear the thought of association, but neither could she leave this man, this treacherous deceiver, to play out his desires in this never-ending cycle of violence. She had to do something. There was nobody left for her here anyway.
She closed her eyes.
And Jan opened them. It was a beautiful afternoon. The late summer sun was low in the sky, and Jan was walking down a dusty road kicking up gravel with his bare feet. He looked up to see his tall half-cousin Kobus walking with him, backpack slung casually over one shoulder, hunting knife in the sheath hanging from his belt.
Kobus looked down at him, and ruffled his hair. “Hey boytjie, are you looking forward to this as much as I am? It’s gonna be a great night!”
Jan smiled and nodded.
Everything went as usual. Jan struggled to make a fire, until Kobus said, “Never mind, boy, I’ll do it for you.” They ate meat under the wide Bushveld sky, and Jan listened to a heroic tale of lion slaughter near the border.
As the fire sputtered and sent glowing embers into the sky, Jan looked up at the stars. He felt so small, so insignificant against this majestic backdrop. His heart swelled and he glanced over at Kobus, who squatted by the fire.
“Kobus?” Jan said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Ja, sure, boytjie,” said Kobus.
“Why did you do it?” asked Jan.
“What? Kill the lion?” Kobus grinned.
“No, Endwald,” said Jan. “Why did you kill my parents?”
When he reached for it, Kobus found that his hunting knife was not in the sheath at his waist. Jan stood, blade at the ready and struck.
There was a small pause. The breeze shifted and the crickets sang. As Jan walked away from the bushfire into the night, he left behind him the tiny buzzing from the small voice-transmitting implant. It lay there in the dust, next to the rapidly cooling body of Kobus Malan.
Sarah Jane Woodward holds an MA in Theatre and Performance from UCT, and has been a lecturer with the Drama Division at Wits University since 2008. She has dabbled in poetry and performed some of her own work at various poetry events. Much of her writing up to this point has been for academic or teaching purposes, and this is her first foray into speculative fiction. She lives in Johannesburg with her husband, two children, two cats and her dog.