Why You Were Taken

CAPITAL FUCKING F ₃₁

Johannesburg, 2021

An image pops up on her screen: a picture of three young students sitting on a grassy knoll. They look like students in every way: casual, hippie-style clothes, relaxed faces, a slight air of the arrogance of youth. Two leggy white men in stovepipe trousers, one in thick black-rimmed glasses, and a young dark-skinned woman gazing distantly at the camera. In the background, some kind of university insignia. A badge. They look vaguely familiar – had she seen this before? – but Kirsten can’t place their faces at all.

He is quiet for a while.

Kirsten logs out and gets Marko’s GPS co-ordinates; directs Seth out of Little Lagos in between telling him about GeniX. When she tells him about Fontus he hits the top of the steering wheel.

‘SHUT the front door,’ he says. He has the face of someone who has just won the Lotto. Or found Jesus. ‘I knew it,’ he says.

‘You knew that the creeps responsible for abducting us are the same creeps you were grinding for?’

‘No. I just knew they were dirty. I knew that they were fuckers. Fucking fuckers. Capital fucking F.’

‘Look, that sentence didn’t even make sense.’

‘Fucking Fontus,’ he exhales, shaking his head.

‘Do you still think that the Genesis Project is a myth?’

Seth’s mouth twitches, but he doesn’t answer. He takes his bottle of pills out of his pocket, is about to take one, and throws them out of the car window.

Marko is drumming his fingers on his knees, then his desk, then his knees again. Hundreds of thousands of faces are flying through his FusiformG software, trying to recognise a pattern. He can’t sit still. He stuffs a doughnut past his lips, but his mouth is so dry that he chokes. He looks around his room, picks up a vinyl toy and pretends to shoot another toy with it. He makes laser sound effects and then kicks the other toy over. In his head, crowds cheer.

The computer chirrups: it has matched one of the three faces. Marko looks at the screen and drops the rest of the doughnut.

‘Go home FusiformG,’ he says, ‘you’re drunk.’

Marko’s place is more of a bunker than a house. Fort Knox would have been more welcoming, Kirsten thinks, looking at the giant gate and 8m walls frosted with the glitter of electrified barbed wire. The kinesecurity cameras follow their movements to the gate. She buzzes the intercom but there is no answer. She buzzes again.

‘You think he changed his mind?’ she asks Seth. ‘He really didn’t want us to come.’

Seth is inspecting the gate. He pushes on it, as if to test the lock, and it swings open. Kirsten’s glad – now they can get in! – but then her heart sinks. Oh, she thinks. Oh, this is bad.

‘It’s impossible,’ she says. ‘It’s impossible that they found him. That they got here before us. I was online with him 15 minutes ago.’

‘You sure it was him?’

They look around, notice some broken glass on the driveway, some damaged plants. Seth heads back to the car, unlocks it.

‘What are you doing?’ she says.

‘Getting the hell out of here.’

‘We have to go inside,’ she says, ‘it’s the only way.’

‘It’s a bad idea,’ he says, but closes the car door anyway. Once they step inside the property and are halfway to the house the gate swings closed, and the lock mechanism clicks into place. The electric wire that circles the property like a malevolent halo begins to hum. They hear vicious dogs barking, but there is nowhere to run.

‘It’s a trap.’