Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [2]
'To go with the rest of your collection?'
His office on the seventeenth floor is colonised by an assortment of hip ephemera, a lot of it borderline illegal. The most blatant example is the low-fi subtech on his bookshelf, a cobbled-together satellite radio smuggled in from the Rural in defiance of the quarantines, which probably only makes it more valuable, more flauntable. It all goes with the creative director territory, along with the pink shirt and the tasteful metal plug in his right ear. The stolen photographs of the underway would fit right in.
What doesn't fit in is the contract. The wedge of white pages on the desk among the menagerie of vinyl toys seems antiseptic, too clinical to gel with all the fun, fun, fun around it.
The bio-sig pen I signed with (here, and here, and here) had microscopic barbs in the shaft that scraped skin cells from the pad of my thumb to mix with the ink. Signed in blood. Or DNA, which is close enough.
'Adams, K.?' A woman steps through the doorway from the boardroom, all crisp professionalism in a dark suit, holding a folder with my name printed on it in caps.
'I'm Dr. Precious. We met before, during the pre-med?' Through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind her, the southeaster bunches and whirls the clouds over Table Mountain into candyfloss flurries. Spookasem in the local. Ghost's breath.
'Can you roll up your sleeve, please?' She's already prepping the autosyringe.
Dr. Precious is here on call. Even ad agencies with big name biotech clients on their books don't tend to have in-house doctors. Andile claims it's because, 'The labs are so impersonal, babes.' But I suspect that it's easier to bring her in here to shoot us up one at a time than to get the necessary security clearance for twelve art punks to enter a restricted biomed research facility.
Not that the rest are art punks necessarily. All Andile will say is that they're hot talent. Young, dynamic, creative, on the up, the perfect ambassadors for the brand.
'You know the type, babes,' he said in interview #1, when I was sitting in his office, still reeling from the purgatory of dropping out, my dad's cancer, wondering how I got here.
'DJs, filmmakers, rockstar kids, and you, of course,' he winked, only emphasising that this is all a mistake, that I am out of their league. 'All Ghost's hipster chosen.' But we don't get to mingle until the official media launch party.
'Just in case one of you goes into meltdown,' Andile said in interview #3, when it was already too late to pull out. As if I'd even consider it. 'Ha-ha.'
Dr. Precious loads a silver capsule like a bullet into the back of the autosyringe. She's too smooth to be a doctor-doctor. She's not worn hollow from the public sector, new outbreaks, new strains. Inatec Biologica it says on the logotag clipped to her lapel.
Before interview #1, I thought their line was limited to cosmetics. I imagine her in a white coat and face-mask in a sleek lab that is all stainless steel and ergonomic curves, like in the toothpaste commercials. Or behind a cosmetics counter, spritzing wafts of perfume and handing out fifty-g samples of the topshelf biotech creams (one per customer, please). This isn't so different after all. It's just that the average nano in your average anti-ageing moisturiser acts only on the subdermal level. Mine, on the other hand, is going all the way.
'Don't sweat it, Kendra,' Andile said back in interview #3, seeing my face. 'The chances of meltdown are like zero. They've been using the same tech in animals for years. Cop dogs, the Aitos, you know, guide dogs, those helper monkeys for the disabled. Well, not quite the same, obviously.'
Which doesn't mean that the contract didn't include a host of clauses indemnifying Ghost, their parent company Prima-Sabine FoodSolutions International, Vukani,