same way no one ever goes to trial for attempting suicide because you’d have to bring charges against yourself. It’s all about ‘the control’ in another sense, too. If you give yourself a disease from a known source, you have a control condition – two patients with the exact same strain. One you test, the other you don’t.
* * *
The yard vibrated with the smell of fresh wood and friction.
‘Maybe the Chinese will be the dawn of a new economy,’ said Joseph. ‘They’ll light the way.’
‘With kwacha and ngwee?’ God snorted. ‘And what about our freedoms? We are already falling back under the sway of totalitarian thinking with the Chinese.’
‘Yes, bashikulu,’ said Jacob. ‘If we want light, we must have fire! Burn out the disease.’
‘What disease?’ asked Joseph.
Jacob swept his hand through the air and began to walk away.
‘Do not run from the argument, mwana,’ God spat.
Jacob glanced at the glob of spit on the dirt. ‘The foreigners are the disease. They are still in power.’
‘That’s superstitious nonsense,’ Joseph clucked. ‘You believe we’re still under colonialism?’
‘Me, I don’t like the foreigners who come here. They just plunder our resources.’
‘Most of the world doesn’t even know who we are,’ said Joseph. ‘We’re still very young, you know. This nation barely has a history or a working economy. We benefit from foreign aid.’
‘Zambia is only young because of the foreigners.’ God lifted his joint with delicate fingers. He sipped the burning leaves and winced with pleasure. ‘They carved us up. They drew borders straight through the villages. Pulling tribes together from this side, that side. Joining us into Federation, splitting us again. It took some time to make one Zambia one nation.’
‘Well, the Chinese aren’t doing that,’ Joseph shrugged. ‘They first came here in solidarity. And now they have come to invest. They’re building railroads and farms and airports. That can only help.’
‘Ah? No. We cannot afford that kind of help,’ said God.
* * *
I’ve been listening to my dad’s Memos, going backwards in time. The Notes are more useful, of course – he lays out the exact procedures to test the mutations. Musadabwe and I have essentially been replicating what he was doing, but faster now that we have access to CRISPR. It’s changed the whole scientific landscape. My dad knew it would. You can hear it in his voice in the last Memos – the news really started to circulate about CRISPR in 2013. The term for what it does is DNA editing and it really is almost as easy as typing and deleting the words in this email. It’s cheap now, too, but of course there’s a patent war already.
Dad’s Memos are more philosophical than scientific. He asks himself questions and answers them, like he’s ventriloquising both Socrates and the sycophantic neophytes. He gives himself diagnoses. I’m looking for the moment he figured it out. I think he was testing the vaccine on himself. Like Salk. Did he test it on my mother too? On Jacob’s mother?
* * *
Joseph printed out the Wikipedia entry on ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’. It was eighteen pages long. He slid the printout onto the oil drum, next to Jacob’s drone.
‘You know I have Wi-Fi too?’ Jacob said through gritted teeth. ‘Like everybody else in Lusaka?’
‘Ya, no. I just—’
Jacob pressed his middle finger to his thumb. A skewer of light shot out from the tip of the finger.
‘You got beaded?’
Jacob crooked the fingers of his left hand at the top knuckle, casting a square of light onto the palm. He tapped this ‘screen’ with his right index finger. The Google home page appeared. ‘See?’ He extended his hand palm up. ‘Even us poor people, we have Googo now.’
‘Technology is no longer the preserve of the rich, eh?’ said God. He came over from his sanding bench and peered down at Jacob’s hand. ‘How does this thing work?’
‘Human skin is an electric interface,’ said Joseph. He had seen a demo at the Arcades Digit-All shop. ‘They embed a torch and a speaker in the finger, and a mic at the wrist – but you can also use a wristband. There’s a circuit in the median nerve,’ he pointed to the centre of Jacob’s palm. ‘The rest is conductive ink.’ Jacob turned his hand over to show off the tattoos radiating across its back.
God shook his head. ‘I like electronical guitar but I will never put electricity in my hand. The hand is man’s saving grace. This part,’ he pointed at his own median nerve, ‘we call