“They’re going to use you and use you up, Pearl Nit-seeko. Then you’ll be begging to give some lard-ass guard a blowjob for spare change.”

  “It’s Ni-tse-koh.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You say tomato, I say ni-tse-koh.” But Siska gets it right this time. “You think it’s all about you. Your second chance, and all you got to do is run your heart out. But it’s a talent show, and they don’t care about the running. You got a deal yet?”

  “My promoter and my doctor had a meeting.”

  “That’s something. They say who?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Pharmaceutical or medical?”

  “They haven’t told me yet.”

  “Or military. Military’s good. I hear the British are out this year. That’s what you want. I mean, who knows what they’re going to do with it, but what do you care, little guinea pig, long as you get your payout.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “My body is drunk. I’m just mean. What do you care? I’m out, sister. And you’re in, with a chance. Wouldn’t that be something if you won? Little girl from Africa.”

  “It’s not a country.”

  “Boo-hoo, sorry for you.”

  “God brought me here.”

  “Oh, that guy? He’s nothing but trouble. And He doesn’t exist.”

  “You shouldn’t say that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can feel Him.”

  “Can you still feel your legs?”

  “Sometimes,” Pearl admits.

  Siska leans forward and kisses her. “Did you feel anything?”

  “No,” she says, wiping her mouth. But that’s not true. She felt her breath that burned with alcohol, and the softness of her lips and her flicking tongue, surprisingly warm for a dead girl.

  “Yeah.” Siska breathes out. “Me neither.” She kisses her again. “News flash, Pearl Ni-tse-koh. There’s no God. There’s only us. You got a cigarette?”

  13. Empty spaces

  Lane five is empty and the stadium is buzzing with the news.

  “Didn’t think they’d actually ban her,” Tomislav says. She can tell he’s hung over. He stinks of sweat and alcohol and there’s a crease in his forehead just above his nose that he keeps rubbing at. “Do you want to hear about the meeting? It was big. Bigger than we’d hoped for. If this comes off, kitten ...”

  “I want to concentrate on the race.” She is close to tears but she doesn’t know why.

  “Okay. You should try to win. Really.”

  The gun goes off. They tear down the track. Every step feels harder today. She didn’t get enough sleep.

  She sees it happen, out of the corner of her eye. Oluchi’s tail swipes Charlotte, maybe on purpose.

  “Shit,” Grange says and stumbles in her exo-suit. Suddenly everything comes crashing down on Pearl, hot metal and skin and a tangle of limbs and fire in her side.

  “Get up,” Dr. Arturo yells into her head. She’s never heard him upset.

  “Ow,” she manages. Charlotte is already getting to her feet. There is a loose flap of muscle hanging from her leg, where they tried to attach it this morning. The blonde girl touches it and hisses in pain, but her eyes are already focused on the finish line, on Oluchi skipping ahead, her tail swinging, Anna Murad straining behind her.

  “Get up,” Dr. Arturo says. “You have to get up. I’m activating adrenaline. Pain blockers.”

  She sits up. It’s hard to breathe. Her vest is wet. A grey nub of bone pokes out through her skin under her breast. Charlotte is limping away in her exo-suit, her leg dragging, gears whining.

  “This is what they want to see,” Arturo urges. “You need to prove to them that it’s not hydraulics carrying you through.”

  “It’s not,” Pearl gasps. The sound is somehow wet. Breathing through a snorkel in the bath when there is water trapped in the U-bend. The drones buzz around her. She can see her face big on the screen. Her mama is watching at home, the whole of the congregation.

  “Then prove it. What are you here for?”

  She starts walking, then jogging, clutching her top to the bit of rib to stop its jolting. Every step rips through her. And Pearl can feel things slipping inside. Her structural integrity has been compromised, she thinks. The abdominal mesh has ripped, and where her stomach used to be is a black hole that is tugging everything down. Her heart is slipping.

  Ndincede nkosi, she thinks. Please, Jesus, help me. Ndincede nkosi undiphe amandla. Please, God, give me strength. Yiba nam kolu gqatso. Be with me in this race. She can feel it. The golden glow that starts in her chest, or if she is truthful with herself, lower down. In the pit of her stomach. She sucks in her abdominals and presses her hand to her sternum to stop her heart from sliding down into her guts—where her guts used to be, where the hotbed factory sits.

  God is with me, she thinks. What matters is you feel it.

  Pearl Nitseko runs.

  * * *

  Lauren Beukes is an award-winning, internationally best-selling South African author. Her novels include Zoo City, Broken Monsters, The Shining Girls, and Moxyland that all use high concepts to engage with social issues and who we are in the world right now. She’s worked as a journalist and head writer on an subversive animated show for kids, URBO: The Adventures of Pax Afrika, written TV scripts and directed an award-winning documentary, Glitterboys & Ganglands. “Slipping” is her most autobiographical story. Follow her on @laurenbeukes on Twitter. laurenbeukes.com

  “Slipping” was previously published in Twelve Tomorrows, from the MIT Technology Review (2014).

  The Smartest Mob

  (A parable about times soon to come)

  by David Brin

  Washington was like a geezer—overweight and sagging, but with attitude. Most of its gutty heft lay below the beltway, in waistlands that had been downwind on Awfulday.

  Downwind, but not out.

  When droves of upperclass child-bearers fled the invisible plumes enveloping Fairfax and Alexandria, those briefly-empty ghost towns quickly refilled with immigrants—the latest mass of teemers, yearning to be free and willing to endure a little radiation in exchange for a pleasant five-bedroom that could be subdivided into nearly as many apartments. Spacious living rooms began a second life as store fronts. Workshops took over four-car garages and lawns turned into produce gardens. Swimming pools made excellent refuse bins—until government recovered enough to start cracking down.

  Passing overhead, Tor could track signs of suburban renewal from her first class seat aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista. Take those swimming pools. A majority of the kidney-shaped ponds now gleamed with clear liquid—mostly water (as testified by the spectral scanning feature of her TruVu spectacles)—welcoming throngs of children who splashed under summertime heat, sufficiently dark-skinned to bear the bare sun unflinching.

  So much for the notion that dirty bombs automatically make a place unfit for breeders, she thought. Let yuppies abandon perfectly good mansions because of a little strontium dust. People from Java and Celebes were happy to insource.

  Wasn’t this America? Call it resolution—or obstinacy—but after three rebuilds, the Statue of Liberty still beckoned.

  The latest immigrants, those who filled Washington’s waistland vacuum, weren’t ignorant. They could read warning labels and health stats, posted on every lamp post and VR level. So? More people died in Jakarta from traffic or stray bullets. Anyway, mutation rates quickly dropped to levels no worse than Kiev, a few years after Awfulday. And Washington had more civic amenities.

  ***

  Waistlanders also griped a lot less about minor matters like zoning. That made it easier to acquire rights-of-way, re-pioneering new paths back into those unlucky cities that had been dusted. Innovations soon turned those transportation hubs into boom towns. An ironic twist to emerge from terror/sabotage, especially when sky trains began crisscrossing North America.

  Through her broad window aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, Tor gazed across a ten mile separation to the West-Bound Corridor, where long columns of cargo zeppelins lumbered, ponderous as whales and a hundred times larger. Chained single-file and heavily laden, the dirigibles floated barely two hundred meters above the ground, obediently trailing teams of heavy-duty locomotives. Each towing cable looked impossibly slender for hauling fifty behemoths across a continent. But while sky trains weren’t fast, or suited for raw materials, they beat any other method for transporting medium-value goods.

  And passengers. Those who were willing to trade a little time for inexpensive luxury.

  Tor moved her attention much closer, watching the Spirit’s majestic shadow flow like an eclipse over rolling suburban countryside, so long and dark that flowers would start to close and birds might be fooled to roost, pondering nightfall. Free from any need for engines of her own, the skyliner glided almost silently over hill and dale. Not as quick as a jet, but more scenic—free of carbon levies or ozone tax—and far cheaper. Setting her TruVus to magnify, she followed the Spirit’s tow cable along the East-Bound Express Rail, pulled relentlessly by twelve thousand horses, courtesy of the deluxe maglev tug, Umberto Nobile.

  What was it about a lighter-than-air craft that drew the eye? Oh, certainly most of them now had pixelated, tunable skins that could be programmed for any kind of spectacle. Passing near a population center—even a village in the middle of nowhere—the convoy of cargo zeps might flicker from one gaudy advertisement to the next, for anything from a local gift shop to the mail-order wares of some megaCorp. At times, when no one bid for the display space, a chain of dirigibles might tune their surfaces to resemble clouds... or flying pigs. Whim, after all, was another modern currency. Everybody did it on the VR levels.

  Only with zeppelins, you could paint whimsical images across a whole stretch of the real sky.

  Tor shook her head.

  But no. That wasn’t it. Even bare and gray, they could not be ignored. Silent, gigantic, utterly calm, a zep seemed to stand for a kind of grace that human beings might build, but never know in their own frenetic lives.

  ***

  “Will you be wanting anything else before we arrive in the Federal District, Madam?” asked a voice from above.

  She glanced up at a servitor—little more than a boxy delivery receptacle—that clung to its own slim rail on a nearby bulkhead, leaving the walkway free for passengers.

  “No, thanks,” Tor murmured automatically, a polite habit of her generation. Younger folk had already learned to snub machinery slaves, except when making clipped demands.

  “Can you tell me when we’re due?”

  “Certainly, Madam. There is a slowdown in progress due to heightened security. Hence, we may experience some delay crossing the Beltway. But there is no cause for alarm. And we remain ahead of schedule because of that tailwind across the plains.”

  “Hm. Heightened security?”

  “For the Artifact Conference, Madam.”

  “But —” Tor frowned. “That was already scheduled. Taken into account. So it shouldn’t affect our timetable.”

  “There is no cause for alarm,” the servitor repeated. “We just got word, two minutes ago. An order to reduce speed, that’s all.”

  Glancing outside, Tor could see the effects of slowing, in a gradual change of altitude. The Spirit’s tow cable slanted a little steeper, catching up to the ground-hugging locomotive tug.

  Altitude: 359 meters said a telltale in the corner of her left TruVu lens.

  “Will you be wanting to change seats for our approach to the nation’s capital?” the servitor continued. “An announcement will be made when we come within sight of the Mall, though you may want to claim a prime viewing spot earlier. Children and first time visitors get priority, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  A trickle of tourists had already begun streaming forward to the main Observation Lounge. Parents, dressed in bright-colored sarongs and patagonian slacks, herded kids who sported the latest youth fashion—fake antennae and ersatz scales—imitating some of the alien personalities that had been discovered aboard the Dean Artifact. A grand conference may have been called to declare whether it was a genuine case of First Contact, or just another hoax. But popular culture had already cast judgement. The Artifact was cool.

  “You say an alert came through two minutes ago?” Tor wondered. Nothing had flashed yet in her peripherals. But maybe the vigilance thresholds were set too high. With a rapid series of clicks on her tooth implant, she adjusted them downward.

  Immediately, crimson tones began creeping in from the edges of her specs, offering links that whiffed and throbbed unpleasantly.

  Uh-oh.

  “Not an alert, Madam. No, no. Just preliminary, precautionary —”

  But Tor’s attention had already veered. Using both clicks and subvocal commands, she sent her TruVus swooping through the data overlays of virtual reality, following threads of a security situation. Sensors tracked every twitch of the iris, following and often anticipating her choices while colored data-cues jostled and flashed.

  “May I take away any rubbish or recycling?” asked the boxy tray on the wall. It dropped open a receptacle, like a hungry jaw, eager to be fed. The servitor waited in vain for a few moments. Then, noting that her focus lay far away, it silently folded and departed.

  “No cause for alarm,” Tor muttered sardonically as she probed and sifted the dataways. Someone should have banished that cliche from the repertoire of all AI devices. No human over the age of thirty would ever hear the phrase without wincing. Of all the lies that accompanied Awfulday, it had been the worst.

  Some of Tor’s favorite software agents were already reporting back from the Grid.

  Koppel—the summarizer—zoomed toward public, corporate and government feeds, collating official pronouncements. Most of them were repeating the worrisome cliche.

  Gallup—her pollster program—sifted for opinion. People weren’t buying it, apparently. On a scale of one-thousand, “no cause for alarm” had a credibility rating of eighteen, and dropping. Tor felt a wrench in the pit of her stomach.

  Bernstein leaped into the whistle-blower circuits, hunting down gossip and hearsay. As usual, there were far too many rumors for any person—or personal ai—to trawl. Only this time, the flood was overwhelming even the sophisticated filters at the Skeptic Society. MediaCorp seemed no better; her status as a member of the Journalistic Staff only won her a queue number from the Research Division and a promise of response “in minutes.”

  Minutes?

  It was beginning to look like a deliberate disinformation flood, time-unleashed in order to drown out any genuine tattles. Gangsters, terrorists and reffers had learned the hard way that careful plans can be upset by some soft-hearted henchman, wrenched by remorseful second thoughts about innocent bystanders. Many a scheme had been spoiled by some lowly underling, who posted an anonymous squeal at the last minute. To prevent this, masterminds and ringleaders now routinely unleashed cascades of ersatz confessions, just as soon as an operation was underway - a spamming of faux regret, artificially generated, ranging across the whole spectrum of plausible sabotage and man-made disasters.

  Staring at a flood of warnings, Tor knew that one or more of the rumors had to be true. But which?

  Washington area beltway defenses have already been breached by machoist suiciders infected with pulmonella plague, heading for the Capitol...

  A coalition of humanist cults have decided to put an end to all this nonsense about a so-called “alien artifact” from interstellar space...

  The U.S. President, seeking to reclaim traditional authority, is about to nationalize the DC-area civil militia on a pretext...

  Exceptional numbers of toy airplanes were purchased in the Carolinas, this month, suggesting that a swarm attack may be in the making, just like the O’Hare Incident...

  A method has been found to convert zeppelins into flying bombs...

  Among the international dignitaries, who were invited to Washington to view the Dean Artifact, there may be a few who plan to...

  There are times when human/neuronal paranoia can react faster than mere digital simulacra. Tor’s old fashioned cortex snapped to attention a full five seconds before her ais, Bernstein and Columbo, made the same connection.

  Zeppelins... flying bombs...

  It sounded unlikely... probably distraction-spam.

  But I happen to be on a zeppelin.

  That wasn’t just a realization. The words formed a message. With subvocal grunts and tooth-click punctuations, Tor broadcast it far and wide. Not just to her favorite correlation and stringer groups, but to several hundred Citizen Action Networks. Her terse missive zoomed across the Net indiscriminately, calling to every CAN that had expressed interest in the zep rumor.

  This is Tor Pleiades, investigative reporter for MediaCorp—credibility rating seven-hundred and fifty-two—aboard the passenger zep Spirit of Chula Vista. We are approaching the DC Beltway defense zone. That may put me at a right place-time to examine one of the reffer rumors.

  I request a smart mob coalescence. Feedme!

  ***

  Disinformation, a curse with ancient roots, had been updated with ultra-modern ways of lying. Machoists and other bastards might plant sleeper-ais in a million virtual locales, programmed to pop out at a pre-set time and spam every network with autogenerated “plausibles”... randomly generated combinations of word and tone that were drawn from recent news, each variant sure to rouse the paranoic fears of someone.

  Mutate this ten million times (easy enough to do in virtual space) and you’ll find a nerve to tweak in anyone.

  Citizens could fight back, combatting lies with light. Sophisticated programs compared eyewitness accounts from many sources, weighted by credibility, offering average folk tools to re-forge Consensus Reality, while discarding the dross. Only that took time. And during an emergency, time was the scarcest commodity of all.

  Public avowal worked more quickly. Calling attention to your own person. Saying: “look, I’m right here, real, credible and accountable—I not ai—so take me seriously.”