Four Years Later
Abuja, 2176
The elephant grass reaches to Ify’s shoulders.
Her gown shimmers in the sunlight. And this should make her a target for the beasts that roam before her, but the light bends around her to make her invisible. She can tell because the world—the blue sky and the green grass and the acacia trees that dot the landscape—all shines golden. Data beams back into her, through the kimoyo beads on her wrists and around her neck. Also outlined in gold is the herd of animals munching on grass while the morning mist hangs around them.
Some of them are armored, mechanized so that their biomass melds with wiring and machinery, but others are simple flesh and blood and muscle. These are what interest Ify. The animals all seem to recognize their shared nature. The metal doesn’t scare them. They aren’t mutated shorthorns or wulfu, made crazy and irrational by radiation poisoning. They are more beautiful than that.
Her Accent, amplified by her beads, allows her deeper access to the biomech horse. She can see the energy canisters that power the animal’s circuitry. They take what it eats and convert it into fuel. She can see past the pistons and the gears and zero in on the heart that changes red blood to inky black oil. She’s seen tech like this built in labs as a means of Augmenting animals and the food they produce, controlling the populations, monitoring their intake and their health from afar. So much metal. Somewhere, there is an opening. This animal is a self-contained entity, seemingly unconnected from the communications network that blankets the Nigerian Republic, connecting every open device and properly teched person to each other, but there still has to be some way in. There has to be a way to hack it. She’s done it before with less sophisticated equipment. She can do it again.
Data of the biomech horse’s vital signs appears on the holographic screen that she holds in her hands. Another trick of the light. She taps a few keys, and data from the other animals, including the lynxes that surround the horses, floods her screen. Someday, she’ll be able to hack pure red-bloods. But first, she has to figure out how to get into the core processing unit of this horse. She imagines triumphantly riding it back into the capital, a scarf whipping in the breeze behind her, the horse galloping so fast that other Nigerians in the street jump out of the way. She imagines her horse vaulting over the cars of a speeding rail hyperloop train and coming to a dramatic stop right in front of the presidential palace, rearing once for dramatic effect and neighing loudly before coming to a rest.
But so far, nothing. Her Accent can’t detect any opening. The animal’s system is entirely self-contained. It seems unhackable. But seems is the operative word here. If Ify has learned anything in the four years since her rescue from the Biafran rebels, it’s that nothing is as it seems.
For several minutes, she stands and stares at the puzzle of the animals grazing. There has to be some way. Even though her legs start to stiffen, she doesn’t want to sit down and lose sight of them. Like so many proofs, the key, the algorithm, the piece that will allow her to control them, is right in front of her. She just needs to find it.
She likes coming out to the fields and being away from the noise of the capital, where so much is happening all the time. Data. So much data coming into her system. The speed of maglev cars, the records of citizen encounters with the police, the mineral count of the jewelry the wealthy wear, the last time cyberized citizens went to their mechanic for their regular checkup. So much data swimming around her. Whereas, out here in the fields, the data is instead the wind that kisses her cheeks and the grunts of animals having their meals in peace, blissfully unaware of her presence. Some of her minders chastise her for being such an outdoor girl. She knows, behind her back, some of the boys call her a Bush Girl, because she spent so much of her early life in the woods with the Biafrans. But she doesn’t tell those children that she has records of each of their remarks, stored and ready for playback whenever she wishes. Not just that, but conversations they don’t believe anyone else can overhear, conversations that contain their hopes and fears and who they have crushes on and who cheated on which exam and who hopes to earn a scholarship to get to America and who everyone thinks is too stupid to even get an apprenticeship in one of the hundreds of labs throughout Nigeria’s Middle Belt. The perks of being part of Abuja’s surveillance team. At the ripe age of fourteen, it still sounds odd to her ears to be called a Sentinel, but she now wears the title with pride. Before, some of her age-mates made fun of her for having been raised by Biafrans and for the tribal scars Onyii had given her. Now the majority of them only think those thoughts, but even those aren’t safe from a Sentinel sitting in the watchtowers scattered throughout the capital.
She lies on her back in the grass, her hands behind her head, and stares up at the clouds. Nano bees emerge from the thick braids that hang to the small of her back and dance before her face. Her own guardians. The ambient noise of their buzzing is enough to put her to sleep.
When she wakes, the sky is much darker. Then she blinks and realizes it’s a shadow.
Oh no.
She scrambles upright. The animals behind her freeze. Without looking, she knows their ears have perked up, their systems have seen through her cloak. Light no longer bends around her to hide her. Now she stands awkward and nervous, and they can tell she doesn’t belong here, so they gallop away. There goes Ify’s vision of riding like a true warrior into the heart of the Nigerian Republic, commanding the respect of every loyal citizen.
Daren doesn’t look angry. Instead, her adoptive brother has that ever-present smirk on his face. Like he’s more bemused than anything. His silver dreadlocks glow in the midday sun. Biafrans would scold her for skipping class as a child. But Nigerians are kinder. They’re genuinely more curious about the world, more eager to nurture that curiosity in others. And whenever Ify walks through the capital or any of Nigeria’s major cities and sees how intricately the transportation systems have been interwoven or how the public universities are often the tallest buildings in those cities, topped only by the mosques, she is told that it is all the mark of a Nigerian’s curiosity. Brilliant ancestors laid the foundation, “and our curiosity built the towers that stand upon it,” Daren always says, like a mantra.
“So this is where you go when you skip class.” He has a bundle under each arm.
“Sometimes,” Ify says, with her head bowed, waiting for her tongue-lashing.
Daren looks around and inhales deeply. “It is much quieter out here. You don’t mind the smell?”
“Smell?” And that’s when Ify remembers she’d calibrated her Accent to override her olfactory senses. Another thing she’d learned how to do after she’d had her Accent fused to her inner ear. She can’t smell anything. At least, not when she doesn’t want to.
Daren laughs. “Most children spend all day looking at screens and not seeing the world around them. Or they are always listening to their jagga-jagga music and not hearing the world around them. You, Ifeoma Diallo.” He laughs and places his metal hand on her shoulder. “You choose not to smell the world around you.” He shakes his head, that smirk growing even broader. “I must say, that is quite impressive.”
“I get data overload in the city,” Ify says by way of explanation, kicking at the dirt.
“Certainly.” Daren cups the back of her head, then brings her close. There is so much metal just beneath his skin, but he feels warm to the touch. His silken robe is one of the softest things her cheek has ever felt. “Would you like to watch a shuttle launch?”
Ify’s eyes go wide. Her heart races. “A shuttle launch?” She squirms in his embrace and looks into his eyes. “Really?” She wants to ask him what she did to deserve this treat and tries to think back on whether or not she recently scored high marks in her class or received praise from her supervisor in her laboratory sessions. But nothing comes to mind. This is like surprise cake. And, well, not everything is a problem to be solved.
“Yes, Kadan. But we must hurry. They do not time these things at our convenience.”
A sound reaches them from the city, muffled by the distance. But the singing tune, almost like a wailing, is clear. Daren hands Ify one of the bundles. Prayer rugs.
“Before we go,” he says, smiling.
Together, they unroll the prayer rugs in the grass and as the muezzin launches the call to prayer, they make salat, the prayer proper Muslims must perform five times a day. When they finish, they roll up their rugs, and Ify hands hers back to Daren.
His maglev car, sleek and shaped like a teardrop, waits for them at the bottom of a hill, and Ify skips in leaps and bounds toward it, her gown flowing wildly, joyfully around her.