. . . these were political entities that still existed, but only in the most abstract and technical of senses, their borders still recorded, their GDPs still tracked. Almost no one actually lived in them, save a skeleton staff of AU caretakers and industrialists.
The rising sea levels of the twenty-first century had scarcely dented Africa’s coastline, and much of what would have been lost to the oceans had been conserved by thousands of kilometres of walled defences, thrown up in haste and later buttressed and secured against further inundation. But there was no sense that Africa had been spared. The shifting of the monsoon had stolen the rains from one part and redistributed them elsewhere – parching the Congo, anointing the formerly arid sub-Saharan Sahel region from Guinea to Nigeria.
Change on that kind of scale, a literal redrawing of the map, could never be painless. There had been testing times, the Resource and Relocation years: almost the worst that people could bear. Yet these were Africans, used to that kind of thing. They had come through the grim tunnel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and made it out the other side. And at least climate change didn’t ride into town with tanks and guns and machetes.
For the most part. It was pointless to pretend that there hadn’t been outbreaks of local stupidity, micro- atrocities. Ethnic tensions, simmering for decades, had flared up at the least provocation. But that was the case the world over; it wasn’t a uniquely African problem.
A million glints of sunlight spangled back at Geoffrey from the central Saharan energy belt. When people moved away, machines had arrived. In their wake they had left regimented arrays of solar collectors, ranks of photovoltaic cells and long, stately chains of solar towers, fed by sun-tracking mirrors as large as radio telescopes. The energy belt stretched for thousands of kilometres, from the Middle East out into the Atlantic, across the ocean to the Southern United States, and it wrapped humming superconducting tentacles around the rest of the planet, giving power to the dense new conurbations in Scandinavia, Greenland, Patagonia and Western Antarctica. Where there had been ice a hundred and fifty years ago, much was now green or the warm bruised grey of dense urban infrastructure. Half of the world’s entire energy needs were supplied by Saharan sunlight, or had been until the fusion reactors began to shoulder the burden. By some measure, the energy belt was evidence of global calamity, the visible symptom of a debilitating planetary crisis. It was also, inarguably, something rather wonderful to behold.
‘You see that patch there,’ the woman said, having worked her way closer to Geoffrey. She was pointing at the Sudan/Eritrean coastline, the easterly margin of the Saharan energy belt. ‘That patch, a little north of Djibouti. That was the first grid to go online, back in fifty-nine. That’s also where we sank the first deep-penetration geothermal taps.’
Geoffrey felt the need to be polite, but he hadn’t been looking for a conversation. ‘I’m sorry?’ he asked mildly.
‘Our mirrors and taps, Geoffrey. The Akinya solar and geothermal projects.’
He looked at her with astonishment, taking in her face for the first time.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, lowering his voice to a hiss. ‘How are you here?’
‘Oh, relax. I’m not
She was, now that he paid due attention, casting no shadow. And where her hand fell on the guard-rail around the window, the fingers blurred away.
‘Not the answer I was looking for.’
‘You can voke – I’ll hear you well enough.’ She turned away and stared out at the view for several seconds. ‘Look, it’s very simple. Sunday authorised you to access a duplicate copy of me. She thought you might appreciate the companionship.’ With the sweep of a hand she traced the indigo contour of the atmosphere as if it was the sweating flank of a racehorse. ‘Look at that planet. It’s still beautiful. It’s still ours, still our home. The oceans rose, the atmosphere warmed up, the weather went ape-shit, we had stupid, needless wars. And yet we still found a way to ride it out, to stay alive. To do more than just survive. To come out of all that and still feel like we have a home.’
‘How are you just appearing in my head? I didn’t authorise your figment.’
‘Sunday had executive override authority because you’re siblings, and when you were small you agreed to trust each other completely. Or did you forget that part?’ She didn’t wait for him to come back with a response. ‘The way I see things, it’s all cyclic. Did you ever hear of the five-point-nine-kiloyear event?’
She didn’t wait a beat for his answer.
‘I thought not. It was an aridification episode, a great drying. Maybe it began in the oceans. It desiccated the Sahara; ended the Neolithic Subpluvial. Worldwide migration followed, forcing everyone to cram around river valleys from Central North Africa to the Nile Valley and start doing this thing we hadn’t done before, called civilisation. That’s when it really began: the emergence of state-led society, in the fourth millennium BC. Cities. Agriculture. Bureaucracy. And on the geologic timescale, that’s
‘Sunday should have asked.’
‘Take it up with Sunday. I didn’t have any say in the matter.’ Eunice moved around him to his other side, resting her hand on the rail again. ‘But this global climate shift, the Anthropocene warming – it’s another forcing event, I think. Another trigger. We’re just so close to the start of it, we can’t really see the outcome yet.’
‘You don’t have any say in any matter, Eunice.’
‘The warming was global, but Africa was one of the first places to really feel the impact of the changing weather patterns. The depopulation programmes, the forced migrations . . . we were in the absolute vanguard of all that. In some respects, it was the moment the Surveilled World drew its first hesitant breath. We saw the best and worst of what we were capable of, Geoffrey. The devils in us, and our better angels. The devils, mostly. Out of that time of crisis grew the global surveillance network, this invisible, omniscient god that never tires of watching over us, never tires of keeping us from doing harm to one another. Oh, it had been there in pieces before that, but this was the first time we devolved absolute authority to the Mechanism. And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to us. We’re all living in a totalitarian state, but for the most part it’s a benign, kindly dictatorship. It allows us to do most things except suffer accidents and commit crimes. And now the Surveilled World doesn’t even end at the edge of space. It’s a notion, a mode of existence, spreading out into the solar system at the same rate as the human expansion front. But these are still early days. A century, what’s that? Do you think the effects of the five-point-nine-kilo-year event only took a hundred years to be felt? These things play out over much longer timescales than that. Nearly six thousand years of one type of complex, highly organised human
