NOTE: This is the beginning of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

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Every other e-mail I get from America says the same thing.

What about security? How do you stay safe?

They act like Johannesburg is a non-stop crime wave. Well, there is crime here. There is hunger here, too, a lot of it. Not just the physical kind, but the psychological kind as well. It can come out in a callousness toward your victim, an attitude of “me-first” that runs counter to the whole idea of a community.

But you can’t just build a wall around yourself, pull up the drawbridge and fire the moat. Well, you can, but JoBurg already has that. It’s called Sandton.Or Randton. Or 100 other things. We’re surrounded by gated communities here, homes and offices where the money went to die. And beyond that much of what’s here is Africa, in all its glory and squalor.

That’s what we’re here to end. That’s the dream right there.

So we can’t pull up the drawbridge. But we do have to be safe.

And to that end I went to the basement of the center, to the unadorned office where a once-famous (and infamous) man is trying to set the balance. Willie Williams is lighter than when he was LA Police Chief in the 1990s. He’s grayer. He’s quieter. He wears a suit now, never a uniform, because he doesn’t have any official position.

But among the exiles who’ve come to Virgin Maverick, he’s probably the most important. Because it’s his job to make sure we’re safe, and the facility is safe, while at the same time making it seem that we’re in the middle of the Johannesburg Central Business District.

To that end Willie Williams stands surrounded by monitors, which the African men around him are looking at intently. Every once in a while he points something out to one of the men, who nods and either continues on or presses a button on his shirt pocket and starts mumbling. When he sees me, to my surprise, he smiles and waves, and walks around the bank of monitors to shake my hand. Then he ushers me through a door and into his inner office, a plain chamber adorned only by a few photos, a few diplomas, and a small desk which sports a picture of his family.

The moment he sits down, Williams presses a button on his PC, which I notice shows the view of a camera inside the room we just left. “I’ve been asked to brief you on our operation, Mr. Blankenhorn,” he says, and I nod in response, but I notice his eyes never leave the screen.

“Just a quick overview. I don’t need the secret sauce,” I say. “I’d just like to reassure my readers, is all.”

Finally, his eyes take me in, and he motions to a straight-back chair opposite the desk. I sit. “We’re trying to build a professonal, honest staff from scratch here, and until we have proof everyone is suspect. Even me.”

I pull out a small laptop and start typing some notes, the keyboard on my thighs, my legs extended outward. “I understand,” I say, as I type.

“We can’t rely entirely on technology, you know, but we do need to use it as much as we can,” the Chief says. Then he reaches into his desk and pulls out a strange contraption, a cross between a syringe, a gun, and an electric hammer. Seeing the look in my eyes, Williams smiles. “Hopefully this is the worst thing you’ll see in your time here, but it’s important. It’s an RFID implanter, similar to those used on dogs and cats, but a little more powerful for use in humans. Can you roll up your sleeve, please?”

I place the laptop on the desk and obey the order, showing him my right arm. I feel a sudden, sharp slap against the muscle, and a stinging sensation, as though someone has forced a grain of rice into my arm. “It will be uncomfortable for a few days, as your body adjusts to it,” Williams says. “Hopefully in a week or two you won’t even notice it.”

“What is it?” I flex my right wrist and forearm before trying to take notes again.

“It’s a VariChip, Mr. Blankenhorn,” Williams says. He presses a few buttons on his own PC, then turns the screen toward me. “It’s simply an RFID tag, which identifies itself when pinged by a radio within the 2.4 GHz range. By identifying the radio which picks up the ping, and the distance between your chip and the radio, we know where you are within the campus at all times.”

Williams presses a few more buttons, showing a display that looks like an outline of the Carlton Center on one side, and what looks like an Excel spreadsheet on the other. “To give you an example, here’s my day so far. On the left you see all the pings done on my chip since midnight. On the right is a display of those results on a map of this building.” He jabs a finger to one corner of the outline. “Here’s where I was first picked up, and when I click on that point you’ll see a time and location stamp come up, 6:58 AM, on the sidewalk outside this building, near the street corner.

“The system maps my behavior against what’s expected, based on past performance and input about my duties. Unless something happens outside my ordinary pattern, there’s no alert, but there is an audit trail.”

“And now the same data will be available on me?” I ask. He nods. I shrug. Privacy was a good thing, but I don’t remember ever doing anything with it. But I ask the question. “What about the privacy implications?”

“Mr. Blankenhorn, I’ll tell you what I tell everything, what I told Richard when he hired me and I implanted him. Yes, he’s got the same chip in his arm as you do. I said, ‘Richard, you can either be protected by me or suspected by me. There can be no third option. He accepted that, and I know you will too, because it’s in your contract.”

I remembered signing something for Mark Cuban back in Atlanta, but I hadn’t read it very closely. “What else does it give you beside my location?”

“Glad you asked,” Williams says. “Let me go to your page.” He types and mouse clicks for a few moments, until a new display appears. This shows the same map, with just two overlapping dots in one corner of it, and on the left the same Excel spreadsheet. Williams taps the top line.

“Here we have your heart rate and pressure, taken through the system in your arm, checked at every ping of the system,” he says. “If you or anyone we have gets overly excited, for any reason, we are instantly alerted and can check that against the location, even contact you by phone and measure the stress in your voice while we talk. It might be that you’re excited over something you’re doing, it could be work-related stress, but it could also be that someone is holding a gun on you. We know pretty quickly and take appropriate action."

“What’s the range?”

“As we buy new property, we extend our network out, which extends the range of the system. So long as you’re on property owned by Virgin Maverick, or within 50 feet of such property, you’re being tracked. Between the analysis software we have, the cameras we have, and the communications we can have with you, we think we can keep a good handle on our own people at all times.”

“What about other people?”

“We work hard to keep that number small,” he says. “Authorized visitors are accompanied constantly until they become vendors and get an implant. You were tracked by my people as you walked in here today. The people outside there are being trained to track our perimeter, and any unauthorized visitor who may come into the area. As our holdings grow, and as the number of people working here grows, I expect that staff will have to grow, too, but we’re always on the lookout for new analysis tools that will keep our head count down and keep our security as unobtrusive as possible.”

“What happens when something does happen?” I ask.

“That’s when the uniforms come out. It may surprise you how quickly and forcefully a situation can be surrounded, but the idea is to have early alerts so we can maximize our striking ability at the point of attack.”

I smile. “That’s a pretty bland statement, Mr. Williams.”

“It’s intended to be. You said I wasn’t to give away the game. And I wouldn’t anyway. Suffice to say that when something does happen, we’re ready for it. We’ve got an indoor facility here, I won’t tell you where, and we’re going to build a larger training facility off-campus. The goal is to share knowledge with local authorities and help them reduce crime nationwide, but only on their timetable.

“That’s the challenge, what really brought me here. If I can help the authorities of South Africa reduce the crime rate, even a little, it will have a powerful effect on economic growth, and on the whole continent.

“If business feels as safe here as they do in LA, or Hong Kong, or Tokyo, or London, that’s going to change a lot of things in this world. That’s what I’m about here.”

I thank Williams, shake his hand, and walk out of the office, through the maze of monitors. No one looks up at me because, I know, they know Chief Williams is watching them.