Why You Were Taken

SUB ROSA ₁₈

Johannesburg, 2021

Kirsten bumps Keke.

Seth is busy with a taste diagram of CinnaCola. Each taste has a very specific shape, made up of how each of its flavours hits certain zones on your palate and nose. CinnaCola, for instance, has a complex, multi-layered flavour repertoire, so the diagram is very much 3D, with spikes on certain levels and rounded notes on others.

It isn’t dissimilar to the grind he did at Pharmax. There he would map out the delivery system of the drugs he created, making sure that the hits and the mellows were in the right place, conveying the best possible high and softest downer he could. Fizzy drinks aren’t all that different. Apart from the aromas you also have to map the fizz, the refreshment factor, and the sugar-and-caffeine buzz.

He was almost finished, and it was looking good, if he didn’t say so himself. It would make a good abstract artwork for the red boardroom. Tomorrow he would work on variations, ideas of how to ‘up the feel-good factor’, and ‘maximise the full-palate experience’ in CinnaCola-speak. It was only 2pm but he felt like he had done enough grind for the day. He stands up, ready to head home. Bracing himself for Wesley’s disappointed look, he’s surprised to see that he’s not in.

He looks both ways down the passage, as if to cross the road, then enters his manager’s office, closing the door behind him with a soft click. He swoops behind the desk, smacks a few keys, looks at the projection. Checks the desk drawers. They are clean, tidy, disturbingly organised, apart from one item of contraband: a rogue packet of Bilchen BlackSalt. Nothing how an office desk drawer should look. No expired snack bars, Scotch hipflasks or decade-old packets of cigarettes. Also, nothing to help his mission.

The computer asks for a password. Seth tries the Weasel’s wife’s name, the kids, the pet dachshund. Their birthdays. The date of their wedding anniversary. Access denied. Out of frustration he tries ‘fauxburger’. Denied. It was worth a try. He walks down to the Waters section, where Fiona now works. He circumvents her office and gets to the elevator, presses the button for the labs. Stepping inside the silver room, he takes off his red lanyard and stuffs it in his pocket. Puts Fiona’s new blue one on. Tries to not look suspicious as he exits the lift and holds Fiona’s access card up to the Lab entrance.

The Laboratory is a huge glass-walled warehouse filled with an army of white-coated nerds. Transparent doors lead to the adjacent factory, giving the impression that it is one huge – busy – hall of glass. He has his own lab coat on, so blends in to a certain degree, but still feels like there is a brightly lit, candy-coloured Las Vegas-style arrow hanging above his head, pointing out his intruder status.

He grabs a mask and sprays on some insta-gloves. He puts his head down and walks towards the back of the hall, taking mental notes as he goes. There are floating graphs in the air: 3D liquid displays, animated spinning cheese-wheel pie charts, shivering towers of calcium versus magnesium. Infographic heaven.

The other activities surrounding him are UV sterilisation, water ozonation, deionization, reverse osmosis, water softening, and blow moulding of the superglass bottles. A ticking banner overhead informs him that this plant produces a hundred thousand litres of water per hour. He needs to get a sample, which means he needs to get into the factory. He doesn’t know if Fiona’s access card is authorised but he knows he may not get another opportunity to try it. He holds the card up to the glass door -

Suddenly the building’s alarm goes off, high volume, as if it’s right in his head. Fuck! He swings around, expecting to see security guards with handcuffs, ready to cart him to the Red Jail. He wouldn’t be surprised if they had cheerful, colour-coded cells in the bowels of this building.

He hurriedly makes his way back to the lab entrance, but the white ants follow him. Looking over his shoulder, he sees masked faces and blank eyes, looking in his direction. He rushes out, trying to escape them, pulls off his own mask so that he can breathe. Gets to the elevator and pushes the button over and over, looks for stairs and takes them. Whips off Fiona’s lanyard.

He runs up the three flights to the Colours’ offices, steps into the corridor and starts to head in the direction of the building’s main exit. Sweating, breathing hard, he wonders if he’ll make it before being shot with one of the guards’ stun guns. All of a sudden there is the chaos of people going in the opposite direction to him, as if choreographed.

For once, the Reds, Yellows, Greens and Blues mix madly and without prejudice. Like vibrating atoms threatening to spill out of the building. As if the building is going to spew this multi-coloured mess onto its perfect pavements. Rainbow Vomit, thinks Seth, surprised by the strange phrase. The workers seem puzzled that he is walking against the flow. A worker bee flying in the wrong direction. Then, a firm hand on his back, and he turns around, expecting to see a guard, but it’s Wesley, smiling from ear to ear in all his fat-lipped glory.

‘Seth!’ he says, rosy cheeks aglow.

‘I was just on my way—’ Seth says, motioning vaguely.

‘No, no,’ laughs The Weasel, still holding onto him tightly, ‘you’re going the wrong way. That wasn’t a fire alarm, it was a gala alarm.’

Seth has no idea what he means, but allows himself to be steered by Wesley into the stream of Fontus employees. The swarm seem excited. They gather in the main boardroom, a massive space filled with glass screens, holograms, cascading AVs, stocked fridges. People hand out drinks to their colleagues, joking about catching Yellow team members drinking Green drinks, and vice versa. The only cross-product consumption allowed is water: everyone is authorised to drink any of the waters, guilt-free. There is animated murmuring and smiling, a sea of expectant faces.

As a rule, public gatherings make Seth uncomfortable. It makes him feel like he is buying into something, an automatic victim of groupthink, a forced Kool-Aid enema. A (black) sheeple. Now, especially on edge, perspiring, he manoeuvres himself into a corner and swallows a TranX.

He tries to spot Fiona but can’t see her. Didn’t see her yesterday, either. The crowd peels away from a tall, handsome man striding in, like Moses parting the sea. Everyone falls silent. He is wearing a sharp black suit – expensive – and just-greying beard and hair. The shoulders-waist ratio of a superhero.

Seth recognises him immediately from the Alba brief: Christopher Walden, founder and CEO of Fontus, one of the richest men in South Africa, and general do-gooder. Like a politician, he has the knack of getting good deeds in the media at every opportunity.

‘Good afternoon, my favourite employees,’ he beams. His white teeth are a spotlight on the tittering crowd. Given his appearance, you almost expect him to talk in a broad American accent, but his delivery is Jo’burg Private School. He cues his assistant, who presses a button on a remote control. Images of an informal settlement come up on the scattered screens: a Mexican wave of blue skies and tin roofs. They are the usual images used to manipulate: dry-skinned, snot-crusted toddlers, skinny-ribbed dogs, litter bunting on wilting fences.

‘This is a suburb in Thembalihle, just forty kilometres away from here. These people are in dire need of our help. They can hardly afford staples like water, bread and maize. It came to my attention yesterday that a couple staying there had been trying for five years to have a child. Finally, they were granted their miracle,’ he pauses and the picture of a sunny baby comes up on the main projection. Smiling for the camera despite being too warmly dressed, the infant’s petroleum-jellied dimples elicit a chorus of coos.

‘This is Lerato. She was hospitalised yesterday with Cholera symptoms. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous Cholera is for a small child. It happened after the mother mixed her formula with grey water, from the tap.’

The crowd shakes its head, clicks its tongue.

‘She was desperate. She had run out of money for food. It was her only option.’ He pauses to let his employees feel the weight of it. ‘But we’re not going to stand around and let this happen!’ he says. ‘There are buses downstairs, waiting for you. We’re off to visit Lerato’s neighbourhood to deliver care packages. Food, paraffin, blankets, and water!’ The room erupts into applause and cheering.

‘Are you ready, Fontus?’ he shouts. There is a ripple of affirmation. Walden’s eyes glitter.

‘I didn’t hear you! I said, are you ready Fontus?’

The room shouts ‘Yes!’

‘Go Fontus!’ he yells, fist in the air.

‘Go-o-o-o-o Fontus!’ the room yells back, and everyone starts moving out.

Kirsten had brought them cold-pressed coffeeberry juices, cream-caff for her, to dull her synaesthesia for the trip in the communal taxi; black double-caff, extra stevia for Keke. Two vanilla-bean xylitol kronuts the size of saucers.

‘Okay, lady, spill.’ Keke says, once they had squashed in at the front. ‘Where are we going and how did you find it?’

‘How does our generation find any wisdom of great substance and worth?’

‘Er… Google?’

‘Yebo.’

They were stuck in traffic. It was unusual nowadays, but still seemed to happen to Kirsten when she was in a rush to get somewhere. She stuck her head out the window to get a glimpse of what was causing the delay. A line of obedient vehicles snaked ahead of them.

‘It couldn’t have been easy, with all the doomsday prophets around, promising that every day is our last. The Suiciders, the Rapture kids, the Resurrectors.’

‘I’ve never understood the whole “The End is Near” crowd,’ says Kirsten, sitting back down.

‘I know,’ says Keke. ‘You hate it when people state the obvious.’

‘Exactly. Of course the end is near! As soon as there is a beginning the end is near.’

‘I hope that coffee of yours is full-caff. You need a cup of optimism.’

‘I don’t mean it in a macabre way,’ says Kirsten.

‘Is there another way?’

‘Yes! I mean it in a… I don’t know, a Zen way. All beginnings have ends and that’s the circle of life.’

‘So what’s your point?’

‘I don’t have a point. All I’m saying is that it’s ironic. Life is really short and the creeps going around with their shouty-shirts telling you “The End is Near” are wasting their time.’

‘Got you. Really they should listen to their own message and get a life. Literally.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So there were hundreds of silly results for ‘Doomsday’?’

‘Thousands! So I ended up Googling her instead: the deranged lady.’

The driver enjoys pumping the pedals. The combi would pitch forward, then stop dead, pitch forward, in an awkward dance of accelerator and brake. He speaks at volume to no one in particular. The passenger next to Keke is wearing a bad weave and singing along to the punk-gospel in her diamanté earbuttons, flashing a gold front tooth. They have to talk over her vibrato. Despite Kirsten’s dulled senses, all the stimulation around her makes her feel disoriented. Finally they see the reason for the gridlock: a red-light brigade dominating the highway.

‘Someone should tell them that this is supposed to be the fast lane,’ mumbles Kirsten, and gets a dirty look from a fellow passenger. The red-lights signalled it was a SurroSis and her entourage, and were to be respected at all costs and inconvenience. The driver touches his hat and then his heart, and they finally nudge past.

‘She may have been schizo, but she was also, well… gifted.’

Keke shoots her a look of thinly veiled patience.

‘Seriously, she had what they called ‘advanced intelligence’.’

‘Who called it that?’

‘Her colleagues, at Propag8 – where we’re going. She ran the whole project. She was a bio-what? A biohorticulturist.’

Keke takes the straw out of her mouth, frowns. ‘Propag8 sounds familiar.’

‘It’s a seed sanctuary bank in an old sandstone quarry. Like Svalbard on Spitsbergen, but a local, more indigenous version. They nicknamed it The Doomsday Vault.’

‘Doomsday. Ha.’

‘Vavilov built the first one. A botanist-geneticist in the 1930s, he grew up poor and hungry, so became obsessed with ending famine. The seeds even survived the Siege of Leningrad. And Hitler. Although not all the guards did.’

‘Starved to death surrounded by edible seeds?’ says Keke.

‘Clearly better people than you or I.’

‘And Vavilov? Became a rich and famous hero?’

‘Nyet. He died in prison.’

‘Hitler?’

‘Stalin.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Are we just saying names out loud now?’

Keke cackles.

‘What about your coco-loco lady?’

‘According to her colleagues she was the best in her field, some kind of genetic genius. She was no garage genome-hacker; she invented all kinds of disease- and pest-resistant crops. Got a 99 million-rand grant for her work on revolutionising vertical farming. Contributed to amazing brainswarming sessions when she open-sourced her ideas for cheap, organic biofuel and designs for living buildings. And she was ambitious. I mean, Propag8 was her idea. She was guarding against Doomsday.’

They travel for a while in silence.

‘So her paranoia worked for her, to a certain degree.’

Kirsten shrugs. ‘Maybe it used to, anyway.’

They disembark ten kilometres south of Bela-Bela. A local cab drives them from their stop on the main road along the dusty way to the slick exterior of the Propag8 building.

The design of the sandstone façade looks sunken into the ground, giving the idea that half of its face is under the earth. It’s the same colour as the surrounding sand and rocks, which makes it blend into the landscape, despite it being the only building on the horizon.

Camouflaged, dry, half sunk, it reminds Kirsten of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, and it makes her smile. Doomsday, and ‘Nothing beside remains.’ The architect obviously had a sense of humour.

Keke moves to ring the bell but the smoked glass doors slide open before she touches the button. The inside is huge, cavernous, bare. There is a figure 8 in the floor mosaic; Kirsten realises that it’s an infinity sign. The only colour is a row of what must be a hundred different succulents in African clay pots along the dark glass front.

The receptionist looks up, ready to help them, but Keke motions that they’ve got it, and subtly moves Kirsten towards the large stainless steel door at the opposite side of the expanse. As they get to within two meters of it, the light on the doorway switches from red to green with a beep (Cashmere Cherry to Spring Leaf) and they hear the mechanism on the other side unlocking. The heavy doors glide open, revealing a high-tech elevator with confusing buttons. Instead of a neat ladder of floors, one on top of the other, they are set out in a complicated 3D diagram in the shape of a lotus flower.

‘Lotus flower?’ says Keke. ‘Was she some kind of yogi?’

‘Lotus seeds are viable for a thousand years,’ says Kirsten. She had read it while researching the vault on The Net.

52 stops to choose from, and they are clueless. Keke pushes the stud closest to her. They start as the elevator moves sideways. When the doors open again, it’s into a dark corridor. They step out, and the light above them flickers on. Keke does a quick dance, Caipoera-style, and more lights come on. Kirsten thinks of the whole seed bank in utter darkness, apart from this little cell of light.

There is another door across the passage. Kirsten steps towards it and holds up her key. The light stays red, and the door locked. They step back into the elevator and study the plan etched into its wall.

‘Do you remember anything else from what you read about her work here?’

Kirsten racks her brain, tries to use Google on her watch, but there is no signal. She moves closer to the map and one of the buttons automatically lights up. Sub Rosa, it says, floor 36. She opens her hand to look at the key. The doors close and this time they move downwards, into the depths of the old mine.

When the door clicks open they enter a space that would look like a bank deposit box room if it weren’t for the floor-to-ceiling animated wallpaper. Huge rose buds and blooms (Rusted Carmine) caress the walls, as if alive. Kirsten tries to take a photo with her locket but it’s blocked. It feels like she is looking through pink mist. She should have doubled the caff in her coffee.

Keke takes the key from her and walks towards the wall of safety deposit boxes. It does its now familiar magic trick and a box on the right, just below eye-level, shows a blue light. Keke pushes it in, and it slides out like a drawer, the size of a shoebox. Inside is another box, with a keyhole, which Keke unlocks.

‘It’s like pass-the-parcel,’ whispers Keke.

‘Pass the what?’

‘Oh,’ says Keke, remembering that Kirsten didn’t have many early childhood memories. ‘Never mind.’ They both peer into the box, wary, as if something could jump out and bite their fingers.

‘It’s empty,’ says Kirsten.

As an act of desperation, she puts her whole hand into the box and rummages around, just so that she would have no doubt in her mind that the box was definitely, absolutely, 100% empty. But it wasn’t.

‘Hey,’ she says. The far side feels different. Not textured metal, but plastic. She gets her fingernails underneath the corner and rips it off, bringing it out of the box and into view. It’s a small plastic bag, like a sandwich bag, but four-ply and heat-sealed.

On the way home a white minivan comes into view, then disappears, then appears again. It looks like another communal taxi, but without the trappings: no dents or scratches, no eccentric bumper stickers, furry steering wheel or hula-girl hanging from the rear-view mirror. Instead: clean paintwork, tinted windows. Something about it bothers Kirsten.

‘I know I sound crackers but… is that van… following us?’ frowns Kirsten.

‘Please don’t start,’ says Keke.

‘Seriously,’ says Kirsten. ‘They’ve been behind us for the last ten minutes.’ Keke looks over at the vehicle, then turns back around and plays on her phone. The white minibus weaves aggressively and gets too close to the taxi. Kirsten starts to panic.

‘They know we have it. They’re trying to stop us.’

‘Stop it,’ growls Keke, but as her eyes go back to her screen their taxi is knocked sideways. The minivan swerves away and then back to hit them again, causing the passengers to scream and the driver to grab his hat, fling it down, concentrate on keeping the vehicle on the road.

Metal screeches as the van pushes hard against the taxi, trying to force it into the guardrails. The taxi driver keeps his head, accelerates, takes the road back. Keke pushes Kirsten down and covers her. They are smashed again, harder, and they veer off the road, onto the shoulder. Their driver steers hard to not go over the rails, then overcorrects and crashes into a bakkie, almost rolls the vehicle.

They sway on two wheels, then land safely back on the tarmac. The white minivan speeds off. Cars all around swerve and hoot, people shout. Inside the taxi: silence, the caustic smell of burning brakes. Broken glass glitters.