Reborn in the Shape of an Eagle
A cow in the server farm; commuting by zipline; a tiger-striped man; an eagle takes form in the air...
Hendrik and me was getting tired of people stealing the Internet cables, then we'd get the blame because there was no Internet. There was a suspicion among the higher ups that we was behind it. Nobody said anything outright but you could tell they was thinking it: That we was laying down the cables and then coming back under the cover of darkness to steal them. Either that, or we had made a deal with the gang who was doing the stealing.
One evening we got drinking with some Americans in that place with the indoor koi pond, along the waterfront at Green Point. I saw some chap there once get thrown at the plate glass window by one of the big bastard security guards they have on duty. It's thick bulletproof glass so he bounced right off.
It turns out that one of the Yanks was Wilm Callan, who is the founder and CEO of World Tree. They manage server farms all over the place but their speciality is out of the way spots. At the end of the night he says that if we don't like our jobs then we should come and work for him. I thought nothing of it. The usual late night drunk chatter. I certainly wasn't going to hold him to it. To be honest I didn't think I'd ever see him again. The next day – well I say the next day, but it's more like four hours later – he's at the door of our apartment dangling contracts. The only drawback he says is that you have to say goodbye to Cape Town and relocate to India.
“Where in India?” I say. “You know, it's a big place.”
“Near Kolkata, but far out in the country, in the middle of nowhere.”
I thought, well I'm probably going to get fired anyway. I should take this opportunity to spread my wings before a favourable wind. I was a bit sorry to leave Cape Town to be honest. My family's been there since the 1700s. Times change, I guess. I didn't see much of a future for me if I stayed.
It turns out Callan wasn't pulling our legs when he told us his place was way out there in the remotes. He'd purchased the ruin of a former English army barracks, then he’d had it converted into a laboratory for R&D. On the exterior it was Victorian red brick. No corporate branding layered on top. If you saw it, you'd think it was a garment factory. Inside it was all ultra high-tech.
World Tree was working on processors and servers that could function efficiently in hot and humid environments without breaking down. In that place we had heat and humidity aplenty and no air con either. It was like working down a mineshaft, which I have done. It didn’t matter much how much perfume or antiperspirant you slapped on. Everyone would finish the day smelling pretty ripe.
Callan had wanted to put a server farm in the basement. In the end, because of the high water table and the risk of flooding, everything went on the second and third floors. They didn't even finish the downstairs. It was like walking into a derelict building. I found a cow wandering about in there once after someone left the front doors open.
All around us there was countryside. Not so much as a hazy city skyline on the horizon. Just small villages. Scattered mud huts, like something you see in an old geography textbook that you can't believe still exists. Women washing brightly coloured clothes around a large ponds. It took three to fours hours driving to reach anywhere significant.
Immediately there was tension between us and the locals. Callan had given the impression that his lab was going to be a source of employment and training for people who lived in the area. The problem with that is, what we was doing is very technical and highly skilled. You can't just get anyone off the street. There was Indians working at the facility but they was university graduates from other parts of the country.
The village leaders accused us of being disrespectful. I don't quite know what they meant by that, or if they was being serious, or if it was a negotiating tactic and they was trying to shame the company into giving them something. They have a very soft way of speaking with minimal hand gestures. To a casual onlooker, it will sound like they are having a conversation with you about the weather, when what is really happening is this chap is quietly laying out all the different ways he is going to fok with your business. We got accused of gentrification which is a joke, because what is there to gentrify? Local people started quietly saying the word “gaintri,” under their breath when they walked past you. It was intended as an insult. After a while it became one, because of all the pent-up animosity behind it.
Things just escalated from there: Three chaps dressed in black robes turned up outside our door and assaulted a security guard. Shaun Eddy, who was in charge of the facility, went down to speak to them, which I thought was a pretty brave thing to do. They claimed that, from the south-east-facing windows on the third floor of the building, you had a very good view of the pond where some of the women went to bathe. They said they had seen people standing at the windows with binoculars, which I find very hard to believe.
They was very aggressive with Eddy. The leader of group kept pointing at him with his hand, poking him in hard the chest with four fingers, keeping him off balance. Michael Sallis, who is head of security, was hovering in the wings waiting for the instruction to take charge of the situation. Whenever it looked like he might be about to step forward, Eddy kept raising his hand, holding him at bay, while he continued the negotiations. He told them that he would frost the windows on that side of the building so that nobody could see out. The chaps wanted to come inside and witness it being done, but that wasn't happening so they watched from the exterior. Eddy had the glass changed in a matter of hours. A bit of an impro job. He had some chemical painted on the windows that kukked-out the clarity so you couldn't see through it no more. The black robes left before the job was finished. I think they realised they wasn't getting anything else from us.
Callan had good reason to stay sweet with the villagers. Although he owned the land occupied by the old barracks, the access was across fields that was owned by one of the villagers. Callan had tried to purchase the land off him. He'd offered him a lot of money – enough to set-up multiple generations of this chap's family for life, but he wouldn't give no ground. He said the land had been in his family for over a millennia. They also used to own the land where the old barracks was situated before the English swooped down and took it, and paid a pittance in the exchange.
Callan told him that he was an American, and that the American’s deep down hate the Brits because they were formally an English colony. To this chap it was all the same thing. Just someone from coming over from abroad and flashing the cash like it's the answer to all the world's problems.
What brought things to a head was some of the workers riding quad bikes over the fields one evening. I was there at the beginning. You can see me on the mobile phone footage getting over enthusiastic on the throttle, rearing up like I'm riding a horse, then falling off the back. I didn't hurt myself too badly. Just a few bruises. I went back to my digs in the barracks when I saw the way that things was heading.
Anyway they ended up doing a lot of damage. The bikes belonged to a company who did tours in the area, along a designated route. They were the ones who brought the bikes over, so there was some local involvement. It wasn't all us, but that was all overlooked. The land owner rescinded our access, so then we're fokked, right? Because we can no longer safely get to our place of business without people taking pot-shots at us. Some of the work can be carried out remotely, but the hands-on science and the server maintenance, which was what me and Hendrik was up to, has to be done in person.
Callan, by this time, had had enough and was taking no prisoners. He purchased a piece of cliff-land that overlooks the valley where the barrack building is located. He arranged with a zipline tour operator to put in two lines; one for going down into the valley and the other with a motorised winch, which was for going against gravity. Because we weren't permitted on the land around the faculty, they had to tether the lines to the clifftop and unspool them by drone all the way to barracks, which is more complicated than it sounds. The landowner immediately kicked up a fuss. The route from the cliffs took you over some rice paddies where there were marsh goats grazing. Tiny little white things. They mistook your shadow on the ground for a swooping eagle. When Eddy told Callan about this new development, he said words to the effect of “fuck them and their goats.”
The chap who owned the zipline company was a Brit expat, but he said he hadn't been there for years. He had all these faded dark streaks all down his face and his arms and legs, and probably everywhere else on his body. When I first met him I thought it was just rivulets of dirt that had run down with the drops of sweat. Then I saw him rub his forearm quite vigorously and the dirt didn't even smudge, so I knew it was something else.
When I cautiously broached the subject with him, he told me it was a char fungus that he'd picked up while in the Arctic. It gives off heat as it burns itself into the ice. The spores travel with the meltwater.
“I was trapped in an ice crevasse for about nine hours,” he said.
He was going round checking the lines to make sure they hadn't been interfered with.
“Like proper wedged in there. Underneath me there was a gap – a dark void – no more than three to four inches across, so not enough for me to fall through. And fortunately when I went down I came to rest with my feet in a normal position, perpendicular to my legs. Because if I had gone down like my daughter in ballet class, with my feet pointed, then I think they would have rooted me on the spot and I would have been stuck there probably for good. Four feet above me was ground level which I couldn't quite reach.”
He stopped what he was doing and extended his arm above his head as if he wanted to confirm to himself that this had actually been the case. That he couldn't have reached up past the top of the crevasse.
“And even if I had been able to, then I don't think it would have made much difference, because I was in a very confined space and I didn't have full movement of my arms. Fortunately there were three other people with me...”
“In the crevasse with you?”
“No, it was only me who went down. My big problem, while I was waiting for them to get me out, is that I lost a glove on the way down so I was at risk of frostbite. I was pretty much resigned to losing the hand when I noted a band of char in the ice. It was kind of in an awkward position across my groin, keeping my willy warm. I pressed my palm against it and the heat it was giving off is what saved my fingers. The only drawback is that the mould colonised me. A week after the accident I started developing these streaks – they used to be a lot darker than they are now, like tiger stripes. That's what a kid called me in the supermarket once – tiger man. I had to be careful touching about anyone.
“The doctors didn't know how to treat it. In the beginning they threw antibiotics at it. Meanwhile I'd read about a Norwegian climber who'd been infected. He'd completely cleared the fungus from his system by moving to Thailand. You see it thrives in cold climates. Heat and humidity will kill it off eventually. They say five years. I was working as a klatreleder – that's a climbing leader – in Norway. I thought, well maybe a relocation to the sub-tropics is in order. I've been here now almost three years and it seems to be working. I set up a climbing company which is tied to a hotel that I have a stake in. The ziplining blossomed out of that. The fungus stopped spreading immediately and it's been in retreat ever since. This bit here on the back of my hand used to be totally black with it.”
He paused strapping me into the harness to show me a small patch of flawless skin.
“Now it's gone back to being pink again. When I spoke to the bloke – the Norwegian who cured himself, I assumed he'd had skin grafts to restore his natural colour, but he says in time the tissue heals itself.
“Does it affect my health? It's about as healthy for you as any species of black mould.”
He went round methodically testing the shackles that were to hold me in mid-air for the duration of my guided descent.
“Good to go,” he said.
I'd made the journey a few times by then so I was pretty confident. It's the ascent that worries me. If the winch fails and you're either stuck up there, or you start going down backwards.
Maybe it was the angle of the sun, but my stretched-out shadow, skimming across the flooded fields did look an awful lot like a bird of prey with its wings spread. I could see the little white dots of the panicked goats bounding ahead of it. When I was a little closer to the ground, the shape of the shadow changed so that it resembled an eagle with its wings drawn in, as if it was in a steep dive. The goats below were going berserk, doing these defensive, angled leaps, almost straight up into the air, like they was pogoing. I saw two of my colleagues waiting at the perimeter for any that crossed over into our territory. We'd set up a pen in the ground floor of the barracks and were holding animals hostage while a solution to our site access problem was being brokered. Things had gotten pretty nasty by this point and the Indian government was involved.