in universities or the military. With his limited reading skills, he could just about follow the findings – automated flight, hovering capacity – but he could not replicate them. He ordered more parts but they were stiff and heavy. His drones ceased to lift altogether, skittering in vain on the overturned oil drum in the woodyard. It was his too-heavy chopper all over again.
* * *
Sylvia had stopped eating. It had been a gradual process. She started with medicine. Dr Musadabwe had hunted her down to No. 74. Just to see how she was doing, he’d said. Matha was at the market, so Sylvia let him in, suppressing her distaste for his skew afro and his stained lab coat and his threadbare stethoscope peeling like a snake’s skin.
She had always hated the look in Dr Musadabwe’s eyes when he examined her. It was not strictly clinical. It wanted something from her. Not sex or money. Data. She shrank from him. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. She refused the ARVs he offered, suspecting he would switch the pills with the ones he and Lee had conjured in that shack at the back of their clinic or the ones they had given her to ease the side effects.
Once she gave up medicine, it wasn’t so hard to give up food. The resurgence of pain helped. It gripped her here and there over the course of the day, like an animal leisurely clenching its jaws around her body parts, its teeth puncturing her skin centimetre by centimetre, skewering her organs at the rate of a shadow’s creep.
In this state of suspended agony, food was a distant notion, a wait, what did I forget? on the edge of the mind. Sometimes Sylvia would smell food or glimpse it – she might see a boy pass by the window with an ice lolly painting his lips blue – and wonder: do I want? But after a moment, she would snuggle right back into the clutter of her aching bones knowing the answer. Nakana. I don’t want.
* * *
Jacob was taking a nap under the mopane one day when Joseph strolled up with a cocky grin and tossed a sheaf of paper at his feet. It landed with a smack and sent up a waft of dust. Before Jacob could speak, Joseph squatted down and made his case.
‘I know, you’ve got this. But listen, this article is about the exact thing you’re trying to make, and’ – he held up a finger – ‘it’s only available online through UNZA.’
‘Futsek, man,’ said Jacob. He tipped his head back against the tree and closed his eyes. He heard Joseph walk away. A few minutes later, a voice woke him up.
‘Foolish muntu. Where is your solidarity?’
He opened his eyes. Ba Godfrey was standing over him, licking the edge of a new joint.
‘With that ka coloured? Ach, bashikulu, please.’
‘You’re going to chop off his head for having a drop of white blood? He’s trying to help.’
Ba Godfrey walked off without offering Jacob a hit from the joint, which was the old man’s version of a slight. Jacob picked up the article that Joseph had printed out for him. It had grown warm in the sun and black ants were crawling all over it, as if its letters had come to life. Jacob shook them off and slowly paged through it, trying to understand the complex words. He could barely make sense of the title: Challenges Facing Future Micro-Air-Vehicle Development. He squeezed his left fist and his new Digit-All Bead needled deliciously in his grip.
Jacob had been beaded a couple of weeks earlier, wearing his cleanest clothes and dabbing cologne behind his ears and marching into the shop at Arcades as if he weren’t currently sleeping at a woodyard in Kalingalinga. Reckoning it was part of his technological research, he had used drone funds to pay for a full package: a Bead in his middle fingertip, a wrist speaker, and a permanent tattoo of conductive ink on the back of his hand. It had been worth it just to see the look on Joseph’s face when he showed him – at least until Joseph had trumped him by explaining its mechanics to Ba Godfrey. Jacob grimaced. The guy was smart.
Jacob took the article and strode over to Ba Godfrey and Joseph, who were languidly chatting over the joint. He sat on a rock nearby and waited for a pause in their conversation.
‘We’re transforming the genes in the immune cells,’ Joseph was saying.