asked Jacob.
‘Yes,’ Joseph said. ‘AFRINET servers are plugged directly into the grid at Kariba. They don’t ever shut down, even when our devices do, even when there’s load sharing.’
‘So, we can never truly take control of our own Beads,’ said Naila, head in her hands. ‘Government can always hack them through the web and we’re stuck with them in our bodies.’
‘Unless we cut off our hands,’ said Joseph with a low chuckle. ‘Or blow up the grid.’
Naila rolled her eyes. ‘But if we blow up the grid, how will we even access the Beads?’
‘Drones.’ Jacob stood up.
Naila and Joseph exchanged a look. Drones had turned out to be the most nefarious tech of all. But Jacob was walking around, explaining that his drones didn’t need the cloud.
‘They communicate with each other with Bluetooth. And they are solar-powered.’
‘So,’ Naila said slowly. ‘If Beads are powered by our bodies and drones by the sun…’
‘Our Beads can communicate without the cloud.’
They discussed various ways they could go about it. They could use Bluetooth to create virtual private networks that would get around the government’s control of the Internet. They could string a chain of communication from drone to drone to reach air towers outside the borders, and tap into Wi-Fi from one of the seven countries that surround Zambia.
‘None of this matters unless we target the grid and shut down the cloud.’
‘The electrical grid isn’t just the cloud, guys,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s people’s lives. We need to make sure we warn them.’
‘It is okay, comrade,’ Jacob laughed. ‘We are used to power cuts in this country.’
* * *
Months of planning later, their mission was ready. It was plugged into each of their Beads.
SALUTE:
Size: Three-member squad.
Activity: Plant transmitters in 3, 4.
Location: 16.5221°S, 28.7617°E. Kariba Dam.
Unit: SOTP.
Time: 22.10.23 1800 hrs Central Africa Time.
Equipment: Rope, harnesses, ascenders and aiders, anchor gear, carabiners, webbing and slings, abseil devices, gloves, helmets, Gore-Tex suits, tent.
Naila had driven into the dam during the late afternoon, posing as a tourist, a gear bag in the boot crammed with equipment – to scale down the gorges for fun, she would have said, had she been asked. Tons of people came here for extreme sports these days – ziplining and bungee jumping and white-water rafting and mountain climbing. In the end, the security guard had waved her in without question, shaking his head at her choice to do her tourism in the rain, hurrying back to his booth to get out of it himself.
She inched the Mazda through the gates and along the top of the dam, rain sweeping over the windscreen. She looked to the left and the right – the precipitous drop on one side, the lake’s tremulous surface on the other, as if respectively epitomising the sheerest of vertical and horizontal planes. When she reached the south side, she pulled into a shadowy corner of the visitor centre car park, right next to a statue of Nyami Nyami, the Tonga god. It had a spiral body with a long curved head like the alien from Alien. Naila turned on the heating system to fog up the windows. Then she looked in the rearview mirror.
‘Okay,’ she whispered.
‘It is hot in here!’ Jacob sat up from the back seat with a grin, pulling off the blankets he’d concealed himself under. He looked like Black Panther in his Gore-Tex suit.
‘Please leave the heat on.’ Joseph sat up from the floor, coughing feebly. His wrinkled black outfit made him look like a disgruntled server at Debonairs Pizza.
They waited quietly. An hour later, Mai stepped out of the visitor centre, in gumboots and a wide-brimmed hat that brought out the Chinese in her by connotation. She would drive the car out, pretending to be Naila – an easy match, beige skin, black hair – so that the parked car wouldn’t give them away. Mai hopped in the vehicle, and they hopped out and crept to the boot to take out the gear bag. Jacob knelt to peel off the faux licence plate, revealing a second plate underneath, and rapped the boot with his knuckles. The brake lights glowed red, then vanished as the Mazda crept off to the exit gate at a snail’s pace.
They headed up into the hills to wait for nightfall. The forest was green and heady, drunk on rain. It stormed the whole afternoon and they were glad for their camo-coloured tent and their helmets – Joseph had insisted on them although the black ones, on back order, had taken longer