for a Facebook rant, a third for overtaking a motorcade. He had sent police to raid a political opponent’s home with tear gas and had him arrested for ‘treason’. Spouting anti-corruption mantras, his party had nevertheless spent lavish amounts on personal business and government contracts. Most recently, he had banned a novel that laid his actions out plainly. Confronted with these human-rights violations, Digit-All had issued a fierce statement, threatening to retract their free beading programme from the country. Calling their bluff, Kalulu had simply shut off AFRINET access for a week, then announced a new tax on Internet calls. ‘Bear with me if I become a dictator,’ he joked at the Sino-American Consortium summit.
Over time, Jacob, Joseph and Naila solidified their respective positions on this state of affairs. Joseph – they nicknamed him Kofi – believed in incremental change through existent structures. ‘Last election we had sixteen candidates on the ballot! That’s progress.’ Jacob – they called him Killmonger – had never voted, but his grandparents’ revolutionary past had inspired him. ‘Blow up the bridges and dams! We must bomb them until they listen.’
To Naila – she named herself Kali – this sounded like just another of those debates among men about how to defeat other men. She wanted to make protest art. She posted links on social media every day: graffiti in the West Bank; sculptures of politicians with distorted or missing penises; a gollywog cake served to a European minister of culture; a giant heroin spoon placed outside a pharma company. She glossed news headlines in all caps. TODAY IN NEOLIBERALISM. TODAY IN NEOCOLONIALISM. TODAY IN MISOGYNY. TODAY IN PUBLICLY FINANCED CARNAGE. It was her daily assortment of astonishing outrage.
* * *
The day the Chinese woman came back, Naila was slow-moving, cottoned from the world by a hangover. She had been up all night drinking and arguing with the guys about data collection and voter manipulation. Joseph was aghast at this distortion of electoral democracy. Jacob thought this kind of propaganda only went so far. Naila was sure Digit-All was involved. ‘I have to quit this job before I have blood on my hands,’ she kept saying.
Electronical Administration at the Reg Office was busier than ever, with four new clerks and dozens of waiting customers. It felt like a crowded clinic: discarded syringes cluttering up the bin, the smell of rubber gloves and antiseptic cream. Naila was filling out forms on a tablet.
‘It is infected,’ came the heavy bass accent.
‘What?’ Naila asked. A hand jutted in her face, reddish around the Bead, bluish in the palm. ‘Does it hurt?’ She reached out and the hand retreated skittishly. ‘Can I—?’ She looked up. ‘Oh, it’s you! Hello again.’
Mai blinked at her. ‘Ya, hallo. It does not het. But—’ She glanced around at the cluster of applicants in the office, then pulled up a chair and sat. She leaned in. ‘It is frashing.’
‘Flashing? Oh, that’s just a program error.’ Naila’s smile made her headache twinge.
‘But it is frashing,’ Mai glanced over her shoulder, ‘when I’m neeya those sack plesses.’
‘Sack?’ Naila paused. ‘Oh, SAC? The Virus vaccine clinics?’
Mai flapped her hand to hush her. Naila fought the impulse to explain that The Virus should not be stigmatised, that treating the infected like pariahs was in fact—
‘They are saying this Virus vaxini,’ Mai leaned in further to whisper, ‘makes you blek!’
Naila did a neck stretch to calm herself and caught sight of Miss Cookie strolling by the open office door with a young man – Naila did a double take. What was he doing here?
‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’
‘Ah-ah? No!’ Mai sat tall in her seat. ‘You must fixi this. Now-now.’ She pointed at her palm, as if demanding that money be placed there.
‘Okay,’ Naila smiled broadly and winced again. ‘Let’s get you rebooted.’
She clipped the clothes-peg sensor onto Mai’s finger and pulled up a terminal program on the tablet. Naila couldn’t read code any more than she could perform a medical procedure – she had been hired for this job because of her political science degree – but she knew an error when she saw one. She took screenshots of the knots and gaps in the strings of characters and emailed them to Tabitha with the subject line: WTF? Then she started the reboot program on Mai’s Bead.
‘Why was this thing frashing neeya the clinic?’ Mai pressed.
‘I’m sure it was just a coincidence,’ said Naila. Did she believe that? Beads had become ubiquitous. They were the nexus of