Inkers (12 page)

“Report,” he said.

“Pedestrian blocking route forward,” the car said. “Should I push through?”

“Not yet,” Hardwick said. “Give me a bit of light.” The headlights came on. He could see the figure now. It was an old man, walking slowly towards them, waving his hand. The man came around to the window nearest to Hardwick and tapped.

“Is he armed?” Hardwick said.

“No, the man has no weapons,” the car replied.

“Let him hear me,” Hardwick said.

“You can speak,” the car said.

“Hi there,” Hardwick said. “You can talk, I can hear you. Can you speak English?”

The man grinned, his teeth a mess. His face was heavily creased. “Hello Mr. Hardwick,” he said. “Lwazi is waiting for you at his home. Go up ahead, turn left, and his home is on your right after about half a mile. Go slowly, there are children playing around here.”

“Oh,” Hardwick said. “Thanks,”

“Good night,” grinned the man.

“You heard him,” Hardwick said, and the car continued up the road.

They drove for a quarter of a mile before a young woman in a dress waved them down outside a large fenced compound. She was holding the gate open, waving them inside. There was a tall boy standing inside, his arms crossed. It was not Lwazi.

“Slow down,” Hardwick said. He peered at the woman. “If we go inside and they lock that, could you break through it?” he said, eventually.

“There is a forty–eight percent I could break through the gate,” the car said.

“Hm,” Hardwick said. The woman was waving them in frantically.

“Take us in,” he said. “Slowly.”

They bumped into the compound. The woman closed the gate behind them, and the tall boy wrapped a thick chain through holes in it and pushed a padlock through.

“Better let me out,” Hardwick said, and the door hissed open, but the woman was gesturing again. “Further,” she was saying, “Further in.”

“Do it,” he said. The car pulled through a roofed area and into an inner courtyard, surrounded by more of the low, mud–built buildings. Lights shone through curtains. There, standing outside the door to the main building, dressed in dark trousers and a smart waistcoat, stood Lwazi.

Hardwick was invited in and introduced to Lwazi’s sister and brother, the pair who had let him in through the gate, to Lwazi’s uncle, and finally to his aged mother, who could barely speak. Hardwick tried to say he just wanted fifteen minutes to apologise, but Lwazi insisted that it was late and that Hardwick must share their evening meal. They ate chicken and potatoes, including more chicken skin than Hardwick was used to, but he was quite hungry and got it down without complaining. Lwazi refused to talk about business while his mother was in the room, so they discussed rugby, politics, and the affairs of Ntlaza, where Lwazi’s family were apparently something of a mainstay. Lwazi’s uncle was the village headman.

Finally Lwazi and Hardwick sat down alone in a separate building. The room contained a large, ancient television, two sofas and a coffee table, on which Lwazi set a bottle of whiskey and two slightly grimy glasses. He poured Hardwick a large drink, handed it to him without a word, and settled into the heavy sofa. They drank in silence for a while. The air smelled of wood–smoke.

“So,” Lwazi said, finally. He checked his watch, tapped the screen. “You did not bring any ink with you, this time, eh?”

Hardwick shook his head. “No need. I know it works.”

Lwazi laughed. “So you still want to buy.”

“Yes,” Hardwick said. “How did you know I was coming? Yonela?”

“Yes,” Lwazi said. “She is very embarrassed.”

“Sorry,” Hardwick said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you or your friends. I just wanted to apologise for the way I acted when we met.”

“You do not need to,” Lwazi said. “I invited you to meet me; it was rude to change my mind, but it was too late. Nevertheless. I will not change my decision.”

Hardwick nodded. “You feel that if I was involved, I would just try to screw you over.”

“Yes. You would.”

Hardwick took a sip of his whiskey. It burned his throat.

“Well,” he said. “I’d be working for my own benefit, but for your benefit too.”

Lwazi shook his head.

“It is not about profit. It is about helping this community. A future for my children.”

“You have children?”

“Yes, two. They live with their mother, further down the road.”

“Well,” Hardwick said. “It’s not just about profit for me, either. I’m an old man, as you may have noticed. I am sixty–six years old.”

“You look younger,” Lwazi said.

“Thank you,” Hardwick said, “But I don’t feel it. I have no children. I have no family left at all. I’m starting to think about my legacy, what I will leave behind. And this opportunity – what you have built – it’s an opportunity for me to contribute something that could make the world a better place. Make your community a better place, a lot better, but also make the whole world a better place. Maybe prevent another GSE, even.”

Lwazi looked at his drink, swirling it around in his glass. Finally he knocked it back and set the glass gently on the table. Hardwick did the same and coughed a couple of times.

“Maybe it is the drink, but I believe you,” Lwazi said. “Nevertheless, the answer is no. I must find a way to make this work for my community.”

“Then don’t sell to me,” Hardwick said. “Let me be your partner. You own the technology, you’d get most of the profit. Let me protect you, help you. Let’s go into business together, as equals.”

Lwazi looked at him for a long, silent moment. Hardwick could hear cows lowing outside, somewhere nearby. Hardwick maintained eye contact for as long as he could bear. Lwazi poured them each another drink.

“I am sorry,” he said. “But I will not leave my village now. I have to be here. This is my place. This is where God wants me.”

Hardwick looked at his hands, turning them over. The palms looked healthy, still young, but the backs of his hands were wrinkled, the skin getting thinner. There were several liver spots which had not been there a few years earlier. Finally he looked up.

“Then I’ll come here,” he said. “We can set up business here in Ntlaza. Employ the community. I’ll use my money.”

Lwazi stared at him for a long time. This time Hardwick did not look away. Finally Lwazi nodded, stood up, held out a hand.

“OK,” he said.

They went outside and finished the whiskey under the stars. Lwazi’s dog came and lay by their feet, rolling on its back, begging for attention.

“There is something strange,” Lwazi said, tickling it, “With the detection algorithm and some drone time I can look anywhere. I can see all the ink in the world.”

Hardwick’s heart was beating quickly. “My god,” he said.

“But there is something strange,” repeated Lwazi, staring up at the Milky Way, draped above them. “There is more ink than there should be. I know the estimates, and you can see it, scattered around the cities, little tiny pockets. Reserves in ITSA testing centres. But there are places in China, in the US, other places. There are some places with more ink than anyone knows about. Massive, huge amounts, more than there should be in the whole world. I do not know why this is.”

“Christ,” Hardwick said. “Let’s hope nobody’s noticed you looking.”

Hardwick was used to starting businesses. It was what he was good at. Mainly you concentrated on hiring good people, agreed what everyone wanted and then threw money at them. In Ntlaza there were complications —many of the people that Lwazi wanted to give jobs to were uneducated. Most had drink and drug problems, and two had minor ink problems, although they could not afford much. Hardwick also wanted to keep the project away from government or ITSA prying. To that end, he set it up as a charity, the Lwazi Fund, its aim to bring skills and jobs to local people. He asked that the government and media stay away for the first few months while they got up and running.

Hardwick tried to compensate for the lack of educated people by investing heavily. A large, modern building was constructed on Lwazi’s land behind his house, mainly by groundbot (flying drones were not allowed in the no–drone–zone) with classrooms and a kitchen for feeding the community. Expensive computers were brought in. Hardwick told the salesmen that he wanted to teach the locals to program, and they did not argue with his money.

In this manner Lwazi was set up with the best computers and satellite time available. His technology worked on the basis of his astounding discovery, made using cheap equipment in his university bedroom, that the electromagnetic signal sent out when the GSE went into operation on 26 August 2026 and the even larger signal burst detected on 10 September 2037 were extreme instances of a radio signal that all ink emitted at all times. The rest of the technology was figuring out how to use some of the millions of drones operating on Earth to detect the signal, without them noticing that that was what they were being used for.

The first part was the brilliant breakthrough; the second part was a simple idea requiring incredible nerve and technical skill to execute. Lwazi set to work in facilities the like of which he had never dreamed. With the assistance of several bots so intelligent they bordered on illegal, at Christmas Lwazi showed Hardwick a map with a tiny red dot for every centilitre of ink in the world. By mid–January it was a live map updated twice a second, limited only by drone coverage, which was ubiquitous in populated areas.

As Lwazi had said, there were unheard–of stores of ink in much of China, parts of the US, Russia, France, Germany and the UK. They all coincided with government buildings, mostly classified areas long closed to the public. These sites were in gross violation of the 2026 International Technological Limitation Agreement. It had often been rumoured on the darknet that such projects existed, but to see it was still shocking, and between spending a painful proportion of his fortune on drone time, Hardwick spent his time worrying about what the various governments would do if they found that they had been detected.

He realised that he was now in possession of information that had the power to destabilise the geopolitical climate of the entire world.

Lwazi came to him towards the end of January. He said he had been filtering something out; a signal that overwhelmed all other signals, implying a concentration of ink so massive that Lwazi had initially assumed it to be a mistake. But he could now see no reason for any error. It appeared to be real. He pointed out the source of the signal on the world map.

Hardwick peered at the small Scottish island and for no reason he could put his finger on felt his skin begin to crawl.

The fascist corporation triumphed in synergy with
the democratically elected power–blocks. Both used the same tools, the former for money, the latter for power: the tools were advertising, including the creation of brands, public relations, and the full gamut of psychological marketing techniques, which at their core always had pain, the exacerbation of the pain, the attachment of a false cause to the pain, and the presentation and sale of a solution to the false cause.

The other tools were the workers, given less remuneration in money or power than they added to the organisation’s coffers by their labour, controlled, coerced and manipulated via the same techniques and technologies. The aim was only More. Through marketing and management the corporate–military–industrial complex accumulated riches for its most skilful and desirous denizens. They raped the whole world.

Meanwhile the earth began to change as its feedback mechanisms attempted to reject the contagion. The ‘developed world”, the bane of life itself, in its greed and perspicuity attempted to calibrate its violence in order to allow the continued conversion of the biosphere into power and money. The poor died in droves as they had for 250 years and the rich climbed over their corpses, reaching for anything they could find to reach for, tricked by their own marketing, which ignored that they and their children would die soon enough just the same.

The world became a nest of hypocrites and the more technology made rabbitkind’s dreams of magic real, the less real everything became. Falseness and fakery became ideals, ways of life, the induction of greater delusion became the goal of the most powerful and successful, and truth was criticised as unable to now exist. The world became an apocalyptic fairy–tale. Rabbits rushed headlong towards annihilation as if, if they had to be mortal, the world had to be mortal too.