Shipwrecked from Reality

“What the fuck?”

I wake dry-mouthed, eyelids split open by a stream of fluorescent lights.

A booming voice shakes me. “What the fuck were you thinking?” It’s my husband. Shouting. Spit flying from his gnashed teeth.

I raise my hand to block the incoming fist of his words, but it’s yanked back by . . . metal restraints. “What the . . . ?” A whisper trembles from my lips. I take in the room, my mind fogged. Concrete walls. Concrete floors. The CBE evaluation room—except that the panel seating is empty. No technician.

“No, no, no!” I start to scream. “This isn’t happening.”

My thoughts slur, slipping through my mind.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Elifasi hurls the words through the chamber’s dark glass.

Fear ripples through my body. “Please, tell me what’s going on.”

The thud of his boots echoes as he prowls in circles around my chamber. “Your initial CBE result was inconclusive, worrying. It hinted at attempted kidnapping and assault.”

“Assault? I’d never—” It’s my word against the CBE. “You have to believe me.”

“Ag, sies man!” His lips curl in disgust, matching the words. “They felt you were too perceptive of the simulation for them to get a good reading. You’ve been in evaluation for three bloody fucking days—”

“Three days?” I whisper. “It’s not Wednesday?”

“It’s a fucking Saturday,” he shouts. “Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been ever since I left you here for work, wondering if you’d actually come back home? They gave you the impression your evaluation was over, hoping you’d slip. And you fucking slipped. What the fuck were you thinking, taking someone else’s child?”

They never let me go. The Monday lunch was just like every Monday lunch with my family, my snarky brother, his brutal words the right shape of sharp. Every single detail, every single personality, down to the fiber of Mama’s favorite blouse, to the woodsy, cherry taste of the wine, the balmy air sour and sweet from the crushed marula falling from the tree in our backyard. They got everything correct, got me to feel relaxed without noticing anything amiss. To pull the walls down so they could get in. Into me. My subconscious is supposed to be my most loyal friend—how can it do this to me? Just willingly forfeit every detail, every secret that the CBE needed to infiltrate me, to assassinate my faith in it? After this, how can I ever trust my mind, trust myself or reality?

In our city, it is unwise to trust reality.

I have been betrayed by reality, betrayed by my subconscious, shipwrecked from reality.

Now every thought must be deceased from my mind before its birth.

I’ve been passed like a package from the evaluation room, to the psychiatrist, to the commissioner of police, Rohan Kohli.

The metal chair I’m sitting on bores into my skin. I shuffle around a bit to take out the stiffness from my body. “What happens to me now?” I ask Commissioner Kohli, whose role my husband’s currently being integrated into—a promotion due to Rohan’s retirement. Wrinkles are chiseled into his face, and his milky-brown irises hold a steely gaze on me. A desk is sandwiched between us, with his blade-thin computer sat in the middle. A wall full of disks and files surrounds us.

He eyes me through his lowered glasses, hair greying on the sides. “This is the second time your body has committed a crime, first from its previous owner and you—”

“I didn’t technically commit a crime.”

He scratches his grey-flecked beard. Zooming into his glowing screen’s text, he reads, “‘There’s a knife in my hand, raised to stab him. My other hand clasps around his throat.’” I’m gobsmacked as he stares at me, waiting for a response. It takes me a moment to recollect the familiarity of those words—where they began, where they dropped. My face collapses in my hands. The Monday lunch with my family. My thoughts, my confession. What the transcriber put down.

I chew on my nail as he continues, “‘She’s so cute I could eat her up . . . I take a whiff of her smell, it’s like cocaine to a drug addict . . . Poor thing doesn’t deserve such parents.’” Then his voice rests heavily on: “‘I will take care of you .’”

My confessions aided and abetted by my actions, motives up front and center. I had the means, the opportunity, the motive all tucked into the soft skin of that baby, that hospital room.

I wilt under his gaze, pull the lapels of my cardigan in, though it helps little with how naked I feel. “I know how that could be misinterpreted, but it’s not what you think. The relationship between my brother and me is—”

“Complicated,” he interrupts, scratching the buzz of grey hair on his jawline. “Your mother said so yesterday. She convinced him not to press charges against you.” The lunch with my parents was real, and the baby incident was a simulation, but both have truly damaging effects on my life.

I bring my knees closer together, head down, ashamed. “Yes, I desperately want a baby. Yes, I fantasized for just one second, but I meant no harm. And the microchip stopped me. I mean, that’s why they’re installed in us. To stop us. Always. So we can remain in this body. So the city doesn’t run out of body supplies.” My palms are now raw and sore from my nails digging into them.

“How long have you had this urge?” he asks.

“I haven’t. I was worried that someone left the baby alone. I’ve been terrified because . . . we’re behind with our payments to the Matsieng Fertility Fund . . . and we might lose our daughter.”

“‘I’m just afraid that the body will relapse and . . . I don’t know, hurt someone.’ That sounds like an urge to me,” he says, reciting my feelings back to me. Jesus, am I his case for him to remember so intimately the conversation I had with my husband days ago? “The CBE doesn’t only look into the future, it peers into your past, the last twelve months of it, in case it missed something in your previous evaluation.”

“If it was serious, my husband would have reported me,” I respond.

He rubs his beard again, peering at me in an indiscernible way. “The microchip reads into facts, not emotions, because under criminal law, you took a baby out of a room without permission. Their GPS tag set off an alarm: they were being moved from premises without approval of parents or any registered doctor by an entity with your microchip registration code. The GPS tag’s AI did not detect any danger or any viable reason that would explain the movement of that baby. Two foolproof, bona fide technologies working together identified you as a threat. And I should just trust your fickle emotions?” He taps his index finger on the desk. “There is something deeply worrying and dark inside you, Nelah. Feral.”

I’m embarrassed when a huge lump of a tear creeps out my eye and takes its time crawling down the side of my face.

“Listen,” he says, “a body can only have three mind transfers. Three chances and no more. A person in their lifetime has an unlimited opportunity of mind transfers into other bodies. But if they commit a crime, that opportunity is chucked out the window.” He heaves out a breath. “You’ll be put on probation. You are allowed a year’s worth of therapy to remedy your body’s fallback and to assess if the problem lies in the body or your way of thinking—but only a year,” he emphasizes. “If all else fails, you will be sent back to the Consciousness Bank until we find a compatible body for you.”

Before, I was on a waiting list for a body for fifteen years in their Consciousness Bank. It’s not a coma, but a limbo state of waiting and waiting and waiting. You feel everything and hunger for a life to fit into rather than wavering around like a vapor of cloud in a blade-thin disk in their servers. No sunrises. No sunsets. No materialism.

Sometimes, my marriage reminds me of that still time stuck in limbo.

You’d think I have the power to claim Nelah’s life since it seems more logical for the evacuated mind to be considered dead. But memories are lost during the process of consciousness transfer, a phenomenon that baffles scientists. Nothing about it can be rectified. The only past we can hold onto is that of our body’s predecessors. The self resides in the body. It is the self that keeps the relationships that belong to the body. It is the self that carries criminal tendency.

By the time I came into this body, I belonged to the family by name. As the memories of my old life evaporate from my mind, goes Body Hope’s manifesto, my mind relinquishes my old life, therefore I relinquish my old family. I am a brand-new person with a new lifespan, a new identity. I no longer walk backward into the past but move forward to the future. It’s part of their contractual agreement when disbursing bodies.

“Next time, the microchip won’t save you.” Rohan’s chair squeaks as he leans back. “I know things have been a little difficult at home, but a few years of the microchip treatment can cleanse you. Just try to stay clean.” He’s making me feel like a dirty woman.

Criminal habits are tied to the brain, where new minds take up residence, and oftentimes absorb these historied criminal predilections; it is the body and the brain surveilled, but it is my mind that bears the punishment.

“For your husband’s sake,” Rohan adds. “He works so hard. I’d hate to see what this would do to him.” As if it does nothing to me. As if I don’t work hard, too.

He stares at me now, waiting for something. “I do feel fortunate. I’m very sorry for the worry I caused everyone. I didn’t mean to,” I say.

“There was a teenager here the other day. He didn’t mean to drink and drive and crash his car and kill two of his best friends. You see where I’m going with this?” I nod. He leans forward, stares at me for a long time as if I might break. “You have friends in high places. But you can’t always be a friend and an enemy to God and get away with it. A sin unpaid for grows heavier and hungrier and will satiate itself in ways you’ll regret. I’ll be watching you.” He lifts an object that grates heavily against his drawer. Hands it to me. A black hexagonal disk. “A memento,” he whispers.

I stare incredulously at it. It’s a jail cell for the mind: a Mind-Cell. “My mind was . . . in this? Was I about to be incarcerated?” Jesus, how or who intervened? My husband. It must be him who saved me. But how did he manage to engineer such a deal? Would he even tell me? I’m too afraid to face him, to ask him.

“You need to be careful about what you do from now on. You can go. Your husband is waiting for you in his office.”

The police staff stare at me as I, the wife of the assistant commissioner of police, perform the walk of shame to his office; the Mind-Cell in my handbag grows heavier with each step. Every senior officer’s office is separated from the open-plan bullpen by a thin frame of glass. Elifasi is standing behind it, glaring at me, his palm against it gradually reducing the glass’s transparency to frosted glass, so no one will see what occurs between us, except for shadow and swayed truth. The heat of his anger fibrillates, suffocating me.

The door shuts behind me when I enter. I inhale the lingering scent of roasted coffee beans, pinpoint an empty mug rimmed with milky foam.

He throws a file on his desk. “You have a file, a case.” Underneath his protruding eyebrows, his eyes bulge with anger. I pull the chair aside to take a seat. He shakes his head. “Don’t sit. You’re not staying.”

I stand ramrod straight, arms tucked in, like a pupil being reprimanded for a schoolyard infraction. “It was stupid, reckless, what I did. I’m very sorry. Please forgive me.”

“What the fuck were you thinking? Did you think you could cover it up?” he says. “Kidnap a baby, carry it as your own? Should it really have gone that far? You’ve fucking embarrassed me.” He paces back and forth, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I lost a child, too, but I’m not trying to wreck my life along with everyone else’s.

“Do you want to kill another one of my children? Does it even bother you that this might fuck our chances with the Matsieng Fertility Fund? That we could lose ownership of our child because you couldn’t fucking control yourself? That her body could be prostituted to some fucking stranger on the waiting list? If the Body Hope Facility gets ownership of our child, only God knows whom they would give our child’s body to once it’s of age.”

If parents lose ownership of their fetus, the Matsieng Fertility Fund fosters the child for the Body Hope Facility until it’s eighteen, the rightful age at which consciousness transfer can occur. The body is brand new, with no bad history tarnishing it.

My lips tremble, and my voice collapses out of my mouth. “But . . . our daughter’s consciousness will still be in her body.”

“For fuck’s sake, woman, this is business. A fresh body like that is a prime estate for whoever is powerful on that waiting list. These organizations won’t care about its consciousness; they’ll move it to low-valued bodies like yours!”

“Eli, please,” I wail.

“You’re not only going to lose us our child. You will fuck up my promotion. Do you think childless men ever get promotions? You’re cracking, Nelah, losing your sense of reality. This is not what I married.”

Tears crawl down my face. “The baby, she was crying. I only wanted to calm—”

“I don’t care if that baby was dying and you were the only one there. You can’t do shit like that, just take people’s things.” His teeth clench the anger against his lips when he utters, “I have a fucking low-life rat that saw my wife’s ass.”

“What?” is the only thing I breathe out.

I was afraid that after my forensic evaluation, a tjatjarag informant would snitch to him. An affair isn’t a crime, but my forensic review is confidential. Obviously, not to people like him who are chummy and colleagues with officials that oversee our evaluation. What exactly did his informant say? Eli doesn’t have the authority to go through forensic evaluation footage, especially ones that concern those close to him. How much does he know? I need to stop overthinking this; it’s making me look guilty even if I am guilty.

I stifle a gasp. “You make me sound cheap.”

“You make me look cheap,” he says.

“Bathong, Eli. When we got married, this was not who we were. What changed?”

He stares at me like I dare to speak back, but the glimmer of anger in his eyes buckles. “Life doesn’t stay the same. You changed, didn’t keep to your vows.” Then he eyes me like the barrel of a gun. “You’re not going to ruin promotion for me.” It stings that it’s not the affair that hurts him but that it might jeopardize his career if he couldn’t even manage his wife and marriage to success. Of course, childless men receive promotions, but they go no higher than the assistant commissioner or any equivalent role. He won’t divorce me as much as I won’t divorce him. But do I need him as much as he needs me? “You’re supposed to be the perfect wife,” Eli continues. “I gave you a chance when no one would. You think men are interested in wiretapped women like you?”

“There’s no need for that.”

“Whom are you fucking?” he asks again. “It must be someone powerful for the low-life rat not to squeal to me the identity of the bastard you’re sleeping with.”

“I’m not sleeping with anyone,” I say. “The forensic evaluation involved you inquiring about our missing child. That’s it, I swear. Whoever you’re talking to is trying to ruffle your feathers. Didn’t you say it’s been tense in the office since you got promoted?”

His eyes slide to the side as he ponders this since people have been talking behind his back, displeased that he received a promotion. Who on the panel would’ve said something? Or might it be the confessional transcriber? No, maybe Eli is reaching because he’s mad.

“Well, they’ve gone too far,” he says, his shoulders relaxing. “I’ll see to it that they’re reprimanded.”

And that’s it. No apologies, even if I did sleep with someone.

He crosses his arms, jaws tense. “I saw a huge chunk of money subtracted from our account.”

The money I used to help the older man at the Body Hope Facility. I wasn’t prepared for him to ask me that today or to exaggerate the amount of money for it does us no damage. He keeps track not only of my thoughts on our Sunday film nights but even of my financial activities. There are seconds of the day that I am wrecked in anxiety, wondering if he is looking through my eyes at that very moment, and I seal them shut, dazzle his voyeurism; to blind him, I must blind myself.

Apologies spill out; I whisper, “I was helping—”

“A charity case can’t help a charity case. Remember that the next time you feel like offering a hand, which you don’t have,” he says, looking at my bionic arm.

Bastard, I want to spit. He knows how my arm is a sensitive topic. I want to hurl flames from my mouth. I want to punch something. I want to scream.

But I will look crazy.

I will seem criminal.

Instead, I nod and say, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry and stop fucking up. I can’t deal with you now. Go home. Stay home.”