Moxyland (Angry Robot) by Lauren Beukes

  The waiter greets Jonathan by name, which tells me he's a regular. I'm still feeling frayed and stunned from the newscasts and Toby's extra report, but I ask anyway, 'Why haven't you ever brought me here before?'

  'Why haven't you, sweetheart?' He's intent on his dismemberment, deftly cracking the carapace open and scraping out the meat.

  'I couldn't even get into this place as a waitress. I don't think I could afford the breadsticks.'

  'I didn't want to spoil you.' His oversize fingers scrabble in the remains. 'But you know,' he pecks at his mouth with the linen napkin, 'now that you're famous, I expect you to keep me in the manner to which I'm accustomed.'

  'So I get to keep you?' This comes out more clingy than I intended, but Jonathan takes it in his stride.

  'It's a little-known fact that you can determine the appropriate time to introduce philosophy into the conversation by using the number of glasses of wine already imbibed as a measurement. And Kendra, my love, we are still at least three glasses shy of being anywhere near that mark. Not least because you are not drinking. Or not anything alcoholic, at least.'

  'I think you're covering for both of us.'

  'I don't think I have ever been in a situation where I've been forced to pay corkage on a soft drink. We may never be able to return here. So take it all in! While you can.'

  'You know I'll pay for it. Don't be patronising.' If I sound defensive, it's because I am. Even if the maitre d' hadn't handled it with excruciating courtesy that was more telling than a smirk or arched eyebrow.

  'I wouldn't dream of it. Not when you already have a patron encouraging your dreadful habit.'

  I raise my glass in mock salute and take a long slow sip of Ghost to irritate him. 'At least it's not heroin.'

  'I don't know. I believe heroin can be very stimulating, creatively. And very credible with that whole artist culture thing. You know, we need to cash in on your cachet. We can only coast so far on the scandal. Maybe a lesbian affair with Nkosi, in the wake of her devastation.'

  'You're a mean drunk. You should stop. '

  'Someone has to. Or would you rather I switched to your beverage of choice?' He leans across and takes my glass. 'Does it have any effect on us mortals?'

  'No. It's just a soft drink. It's how it interacts with the nano. Didn't Andile tell you?'

  I don't know why I entertained the concept for one instant that there was something I could accomplish on my own. I'm furious for not guessing this was Jonathan's doing from the start, for not recognising the mark of his blunt fingers.

  Of course he was the one who recommended me to Andile, old colleagues from when he used to shoot the Nokia Fash Week catalogues. It could just as easily have been any other young up-and-coming. I've tried to explain how he's undermined me, but Jonathan just laughs and trudges out hackneyed clichés about how it's who you know.

  'Or,' I snap, 'who you're sleeping with.' Not that we've slept together since I had the procedure done.

  He tells me I'm too tense, and I am. The articles are freaking me out, but this is something I can't forgive him, because, dammit, this was supposed to be mine.

  He takes a sip. 'Ugh. That's nasty. The limevanilla's quite nice, but the aftertaste. It's so chemical.' He thrusts it back at me. 'I suppose you're right, though. The lesbian affair is very passé. Right up there with the heroin thing, and you're a new breed. My little art star.' He leans over the table to kiss me, awkward.

  'You mean, your meal-ticket.'

  'Same thing. So, how are we going to build on your first success? What's next? You said something about street kids and their pitiful possessions? Oh, Kendra. Don't cry.' He is more impatient than sympathetic.

  'I'm not crying,' but denying it only makes my face slip more.

  'You're being way too sensitive. You shouldn't take it personally.'

  'It's my work, Jonathan.' I'm desperately aware of people in the restaurant looking. Naledi Nxumalo leans in to the rugby player with the exact gossipy gleam in her eyes that's her trademark in Bright City.

  'And your work is very, very good, baby.'

  'I feel hung out in limbo. I want to sledgehammer my cameras. I want to set the film stock alight.'

  'Not a bad idea for a performance piece. Okay, I'm sorry. Don't look like that. I'm sorry.'

  'I wish you would take me seriously.'

  'Kendra,' he says, taking my hands across the table. 'This is the best thing that could have happened to you, career-wise. You couldn't have planned it.'

  There is something in his voice, a wink, a pride that tips me off.

  And I realise something that's been simmering in the back of my brain since I first saw the newscasts.

  'The security footage had audio.'

  Jonathan grins. 'Don't be so naïve, my darling, of course it did. We had it specially installed.'

  I drop my fork with a clatter and shove the chair back from the table so that Naledi Nxumalo and the rugby captain and half a dozen others perk up with interest.

  'Don't be so dramatic.' Why is it that half of what he says to me always starts with 'Don't'?

  'Come on Kendra, there aren't even any press here. It's a wasted effort. Sit down, please.' And despite my best intentions to defy him, I do.

  'You're a rational animal, Kendra. You know what this means for you as an artist.'

  In my head, I am fashioning scathing putdowns, like I wouldn't expect someone who never graduated from photographing fashion shoots – even if it is for the likes of Vanity Fair – to be capable of comprehending artistic integrity, but somehow these don't make it out of my mouth. Because I am afraid. That he's right. That without him, I am a nonentity. Girl in limbo. Ghost girl.

  Jonathan orders me another one, unasked for, which I know the waiter will have to run down to the corner café to get, and I realise this is the end of something. Maybe not limbo so much as the falling space, like the moment after you've thrown yourself backwards off the boat, your hand on your regulator to stop it jerking free, but before you hit the water. Poised between.

  Tomorrow I will spend the day apartment hunting. I will find a place to stay, no matter how much of a hovel, that is mine. As in, nothing to do with Jonathan. In the evening, I will take the underway down to Replica. Maybe hook up with Damian and Vix. Make new friends. I still have Toby's comp.

  That e-vite suddenly feels like a passport to somewhere other than here. And maybe tomorrow, everything will be different.

  Lerato

  So here we are, three mismatched women holding a meaningless memorial to three people I don't remember. It's bad enough I have to endure my sisters – Zama looking positively plump and matronly in a white kaftan and Xhosastyled headscarf, her attempt to dress up nice for the ancestors; Sipho in jeans and an orange t-shirt, with a shaven head that makes her look like a chemo survivor – but the gale-force wind is something else. We have to lean into it to get to the edge of the cliff overlooking Cape Point, and the herbs Sipho throws into the air get whipped straight back at us. There is a small cluster of foreign tourists who have braved the baboons and the wind to get up here, and who are utterly charmed by the proceedings, cameras clicking.

  The reason we're doing it here, at the craggy tip of the peninsula, rather than somewhere less exposed to the southeaster (like Clifton corporate, say) is because Sipho says we have to throw our prayers out to the wind and sea to carry them to our loved ones. It would be touching, if it weren't so Hallmark, if we hadn't done it all before. As remembrance rituals go, it's an empty gesture, Sipho chanting some Buddhist shit and tossing around more bits of crushed leaf, just adding to the flotsam already whirling in the wind.

  'If we were following tradition, we would kill a goat,' says Zama sagely, as if she hasn't offered some variation on this insight every year. This makes me lose my patience.

  'As if we would get a licence to kill a goat in public. As if our Buddhist vegan over here would stand for it. But okay, Zama, assuming we could get that all worked out, then we could all
have a big party, just like tradition specifies, eat our goat, drink mqombothi which you would have brewed up as the eldest, and each of us would get a bit of bloody sinew and hide tied onto our wrists to dry out. Because nothing says thanks to your ancestors like a bracelet made of smelly goat's flesh.'

  Zama is pissed. 'I think it sucks that you don't have any respect for your culture.'

  'I think it sucks that you're deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn't just read it on Wikipedia. There's a difference between tradition and culture, Zama. The only fucking culture we got was growing up in a corporate skills school.'

  Fighting instantly reduces us to being nine and six all over again, with Sipho trying to play peacekeeper in the middle, spinning her hippie crap about the moment and how we're ruining it.

  'Please guys. Look!' Sipho pulls a bundle of red elastic bands from her pocket.

  'Stealing stationery from the monks again?'

  'Lerato!' Zama snaps, scandalised, as if she doesn't agree with my diagnosis that Sipho's a nutjob.

  'No, look. It's not goat. But it's something.'

  Zama's eyes go all glassy. 'This is really… Did you bring this along specially?'

  'No. It was what you were saying.' She is so sweet, so much a naïf, you can't really be mean to her. I wonder if she'd be tougher, smarter, if she wasn't always trying to balance us out.

  I snap the elastic onto Zama's wrist, stretching it out, so that it'll hurt on the rebound. 'Uh, yeah, but isn't this more Kabbalah than Buddhist? Now there's a tradition.'

  They both glare at me.

  Family are the people who irritate you the most and the most effortlessly. If it were anyone else, I wouldn't give a damn and it bugs me a lot that I let them get to me, Zama's more-spiritual-than-you bullshit and Sipho's little-girl-lost act. Not for the first time, I swear this is the last time. That I'm not coming out here again. I will stop returning phone calls and emails. I will cut conversations short. I will forget birthdays and not be able to make anniversaries. I will let this drift, like continents, slowly, imperceptibly. Or fuck it, just put one between us. My exit plan is my faux-goat red elastic, my backdoor embedded in the adboards, sending me secrets worth money to the right eye. If Stefan doesn't come through, it's all I have to hang onto.

  We sit in awkward silence inside the restaurant, protected from the wind but not the uncrossable distances between us. The only part of family 'tradition' we get right is the getting drunk, so that when I get home, I pass out and miss everything.

  Toby

  The underway is so jammed I have to loop and thread between the press of commuters. No worries for a boy on the skinny, nipping the gaps. But I am worried (not much, but they're only paying me the second instalment after mission accomplished) about the rest of Clan Stinger in my wake. Doyenne especially. That girl is built sumo. But a backwards glance reveals that she's just ploughing that construction worker bulk through, the crowd sensibly parting for her, while Ibis (aka Julia from the barcade) slipstreams in her wake. I've lost view of Twitch, but I'm sure the little shit can take care of himself.

  In realworld, Doyenne is a taxi driver in her mid-40s – maybe a tad decrepit for fun and games, but who am I to thwart her recreational? Cos that's what it's about, right? Re-creations of lives you could never live.

  We're all civilian. Specs were undercover, although I'm not going anywhere without my BabyStrange, that's for you, kids, for your enjoyment. It's switched to live-feed from my splinter-new phone, no delay on the uplink. It's also perfect for hiding the telltale bulge of the .44 riding on my hip.

  On the escalator, standing behind me, Ibis aka Julia checks her lipgloss in my coat. You gotta admire a girl who has the presence of mind to touch up her prettifiers pre-combat. She's been relatively cold to me since we were reintroduced. But then, I didn't call. But then, I never do.

  'You activated?' she murmurs behind me, so soft only I can hear, cos we're playing strangers for the moment, until such time as Doyenne decides we're good to make our play. As soon as Twitch has scoped out the lie of the land.

  I don't bother to answer. As if I would have forgotten in the heat. My phone is already blinking blue, logged onto Playnet and legit with the relevant authorities – although unlike my crime-busting colleagues over here, I'm registered under a fake name. It's not necessary, but let's say I've developed a taste for anonymity, for taking on an artificial ID (like Diary isn't an exaggerated persona already). I'm sure it's all going to get terribly confusing. Try to keep up.

  I grab hold of the rails with both hands and swing over the top steps, my coat flaring behind. Julia pushes past me, just another underway annoyance, her boots making sharp cicada clicks on the vibracrete as she vanishes into the cram. I swivel on my heel and prowl over to the newsstand to buy a bottle of water. No sense going into this dehydrated. It's still lank early. Fourteen minutes ahead of schedule. We've got time to kill.

  Doyenne's strict on the punctuality, Twitch told me while we were sitting in the taxi waiting for her to come back from the petrol station loo, cos she has a spastic colon. He was switching through the motions on his rifle, checking the mechanics until the constant clack got to me, and I grabbed his hand to stop him doing it.

  'Leave him alone. It chills him out.' Ibis aka Julia spoke from the front of the car, not even looking round.

  'Well, it's riding me one time.'

  'He needs it. He's OCD.'

  'For fuck's sake. Can't he take meds? Or a hit of sugar?' My luck to latch up with a crew with sufficient medical ailments to fill a doctor's waiting room. And that's not even counting the guy I'm replacing, who broke his collarbone moving a fridge.

  'Nah. Meds blunt his focus. And Doyenne doesn't shine to drugs, so don't talk about whatever you're on now, okay?' She cocked her head over her shoulder, presenting a shadow of profile, just enough so I could see the dark mole at the corner of her lip that makes her mouth look faintly misshapen. 'And besides, he's fourteen. So lay off, okay?'

  'Okay. Kit Kat!' I lifted my hand off his, and the kid went right back into the damn clicking, sliding the ammo clip out, slamming it back in. 'Do your parents know where you're at tonight, Twitch?'

  He looked puzzled, although at least he stopped with the damn clicking for an instant, and then launched straight back into it, not looking up. 'For your information, fuckwit, my mom was the one who hooked me up with Stinger.'

  From the front, Ibis aka Julia snickered.

  I take a sip of water and flip casually through the racks, sneaking previews on some of the pushmags, but being particular in not skeeming the gaming titles, cos you don't want to be too obvious. Keep it tight.

  'You gonna buy that?' The shop chick, a bovine dumpy blonde, eyes dulled by one too many soapcasts, picks at her teeth with a fingernail, intent on the blurbvert playing on the screen above the till.

  'Me? Hmm. No. I don't think so.'

  'Well then, skip it.'

  'Hey, I already bought the water. Doesn't that entitle me to browsing rights?'

  'You gotta buy.'

  'Fine.'

  I skim the shelves and grab a dark porn push, way up top, hand it to her to scan and flash my phone at the till. And then I crack the seal and start paging through it in front of her, pausing to show her a grotesque special on page six, cranking the volume up. She grimaces, managing to look even stupider and uglier, and leans back on her stool, pumping up the sound on her soap to try and drown me out.

  I'm enjoying this now. I flick through to find another disturbing combo – oh, don't sweat it, it's all digital re-creations, they wouldn't really force a hyena to mount a nubile teenager.

  Her repulsed reaction, the way I'm playing her, kicks up my rush. It's a sugar–bliss combo, if you were wondering, just enough to remix my experience of the world a little.

  I glance round to check on the mission status. There's no sign of the little OCD monster. Doyenne is standing peering at the map but really scouting out the juncti
on, looking through the screen to the platforms below; Ibis/Julia is sitting primly on a bench, reading a book, her

  posture straight as an arrow.

  Someone in the crowd jostles me harder than is politely acceptable, so I nearly drop the pushmag. Often, I get off on the tight; walking so close you can feel the swerve of the air currents between you and the people coming in the opposite direction. And it's always fun to infringe on people's personal space. But the crush is even thicker now, like fucking rush hour or like there's a soccer game on. Last time Orlando Pirates played the city stadium, eight people were fatally squished in this very station.