Joy Sebenza,

Chapter 1 Silvia loves these unhurried moments with the bushveld baking in the sun, the peaceful cooing of doves in the trees, and a susurrus in the tall yellow grass around the arrival port.[A1] She is watching an alien sight walking down the dirt road. It’s short and black, and it has a giant head of dreadlocks and skinny legs that makes it look like some kind of tokoloshe. What the frying fritters is that? she thinks. It’s blurred, as if water is hovering over the horizon—a heat mirage. She is waiting in her 4208 Rugged [A2] parked in the dappled shade of an umbrella thorn tree. The apparition gets closer, and Silvia sees that it has four legs. So, it can’t be the tokoloshe then. It walks onto the arrival port on the far side from where Silvia is parked, and as it winds its way past hovercrafts, transport pods and cars, it turns out to be two boys carrying a fly pack on their heads. Their legs are as black as the fly pack, and what looked like dreadlocks are merely the fly pack’s many bendy air tubes. Silvia shakes her head smiling. This is kind of the wrong way around. The fly pack is supposed to carry them, blasting air out of its hundreds of tubes and making them soar over grasslands and rivers, over the village of Elbow with its rainbow of metallic colors shimmering in the hot sun, and all the way to wherever it is they want to go. The fly pack must be broken, but those two clearly have their own plans for it. She leans back in her car seat and leaves the kids to their adventures. She lets her eyes rest on the carpet daisies and oortjies growing through the porous solar panels of the arrival port. Fat-leaved [A3] aloes with orange flowers, like rockets, reach up here and there, where solar panels have been removed for them. There’s a welcome coolness in the breeze, and it carries the scent of red earth mingled with whiffs of dusty plants waiting patiently for the rain. A flock of hadadas flies up with loud laughing calls. Their flapping wings and long slender beaks are silhouetted against the hospital for a few moments. Silvia’s hospital, as she likes to think of it. It has smooth curved sides that rise eight stories high, which makes the metallic apricot-colored building the tallest for many klicks around, above ground anyway. Silvia frowns slightly at the Rugged’s [A4] bumper hologram that she can see flickering in the vanity mirror. The silly thing is misfiring again. Its neon pink words, ‘my other transporter is a Spidi One’, are only just visible in the sunlight. The bumper hologram is not Silvia’s taste, it was stuck on there when she bought it. Taste is not a matter Silvia invests in. She has a sprig of purple lavender stuck through her spongy hair. Not because it goes with the freckles over her flat Pedi nose and her peachy-white skin, or because it beautifully complements her eyes, as green as the dusty acacia tree leaves (which it does), but because Silvia knows the fragrance has a calming effect on her patients. She checks the flat oily screen of the device affixed to her forearm. No message from her teenage daughter. Probably busy with homework. Silvia still has a good fifteen minutes before her shift starts, so she opens the door and stretches her one leg out so her foot can rest on the window frame. A big bird with black and white dots lands close to her car and starts pecking at things with its enormous yellow bill. “Hello there yellow-billed hornbill,” Silvia says softly. She taps a few times on her device, and the sound of a broadcast drifts into the tranquil afternoon. The yellow-billed hornbill stops its hopping after its creepy-crawly lunch and cocks its head at the neutral tones of the news reporter’s voice. “On the space front, the Plastic Planet’s docking ports will be closed to Earth for maintenance at the beginning of next year, from the sixth of January 4289 until the sixth of February 4289. In traveling and tourism today, December through March is the best time to see the aurora borealis in Alaska …” Why have I never traveled? Silvia puzzles over this as the news reporter carries on about faraway places. It’s not like it’s really far, is it? Not with today’s transport. So why do I not travel? She feels a longing, undefined. Maybe it’s time for a bit of adventure of my own, she thinks. “Precious Pretorius has engaged in advertising unaccompanied by scientific peer-reviewed proof of the claims in question. Her device will be open to the public for one month as a precaution, and she is referred for therapy …” Silvia is listening with half an ear. “In political news, the South African minister of relations with Australia has been sent back to debate school for committing the logical fallacy of hasty generalization. Mizz Riana Rautenbach, the well-known and respected society figure of the village of Credula here in South Africa, has made an official complaint about the time he will lose in office.” Riana Rautenbach, Silvia thinks. The name sounds familiar to her, like a half-forgotten classmate from primary school. Could be, she thinks. Credula is close to Elbow, where Silvia lives. “A person, whose identity will not be disclosed at this time, was referred for therapy after concerns of manipulative behavior were raised. Ze consented to a Psychological Combination Scan…” Ze, Silvia thinks. A nonbinary pronoun. They really mean to not disclose this person’s identity. [A5] Eish. Manipulative behavior? How is it possible that some people still struggle with things like that? We have achieved utopia. We have no wars, no hunger. Every child is wanted and loved. 99.9 percent[A6] of people reach self-actualization. We’ve got people living on other planets, on space stations. We have spaceships as big as continents. Our technology is the stuff of dreams. Earth’s fauna and flora are thriving. Crime is supposed to be just about nonexistent. Not that manipulation is a crime. I suppose crime is nonexistent. Just about. There hasn’t been a murder in South Africa in more than a thousand years. That’s something. Silvia stares over the arrival port, her serene mood somewhat marred. This is not what I wanted to do with my fifteen minutes. The yellow-billed hornbill turns a knowing white-rimmed eye on her. Her forehead relaxes. She wasn’t aware that she had it all creased up. ‘Less harm begets less harm’, she thinks. That is how the Age of Integrity was achieved, through the practicing of ‘less harm begets less harm’[A7] , every generation causing less harm to the next. Every child learns that at school. For Silvia, that was some years ago. The news is doing me harm, she thinks as the broadcast surfaces once again in her consciousness: “Hairbrushes of inferior quality did in fact make it onto the market. The handles would break off after a mere few months of use …” “Off!” Silvia says to set her device on quiet.[A8] Her eye catches something moving on the arrival port, but it’s only the kids with the broken fly pack again. They have climbed up a boulder in the hospitals garden, and now they’re jumping off it, holding the fly pack above their heads. She keeps watching them as they repeat this a few times, without succeeding in getting it to fly. She’s pretty sure she knows those two boys. After a while, someone comes to meet them on the arrival port. It’s that new nurse. The kids set the fly pack down, and the three of them seem to be discussing it. Ha, looks like he’s showing them how to fix it. Snoot, it’s always good to fix things yourself instead of dropping it off at a repair station. Or dropping it off a rock, apparently. By the time Silvia’s fifteen minutes are up, she’s forgotten all about being upset about manipulative people and defective hairbrushes. Still smiling at the image of the alien tokoloshe, she picks up her lunch bag and scoots out of the car, stretches out her back muscles, and butts the door closed.