The man, the cat and the dog came over a sand dune like magic. One minute we saw nothing but sand, the next there was a man at the dune’s peak, and he was waving at us. “Saw you all from a mile away,” he said from the top of the dune. “Plus, you four make a ton of noise out here, even with the wind.” He was a small compact man of about forty with a head full of tight, short salt and pepper dreadlocks and a mouth full of gold teeth. At his feet were a hearty tabby cat and an equally hearty pointy-eared blue-gray dog with bright blue eyes. They trotted to GPS and Carpe Diem.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing behind the man.
It looked like a rusted, bicycle-sized white box resting on two fat wheels. The top and sides of it were green with leafy hanging plants. As it slowly, steadily scaled the sand dune, heading right toward us, a narrow white funnel shot up from it, reaching high into the sky. It made a loud whoooooosh! and the air around us grew comfortably cool. The contraption had a capture station collecting water. I laughed. This was why the green plants on it stayed healthy; they had an easy, constant source of water.
“That’s a planter, isn’t it?” DNA asked, grinning.
I looked around. Planters were the property of Ultimate Corp, and Ultimate Corp always monitored its equipment.
“Relax,” the man said. “They actually don’t monitor planters. That’s how rich Ultimate Corp is. They hire us. They pay us if we send invoices. They record how many plants we plant. And they’re so confident in our desperation and so rich that they don’t bother checking on us if we go rogue, as I have.”
“You don’t plant?” DNA asked.
“Oh I did for a year or two, then I decided it was time to go. I know you think I’m touched, but I don’t need money.”
DNA shook his head. “I don’t think you’re, uh, touched. Out here, money isn’t everything.”
The man nodded. He squinted at the cat rubbing itself against his legs. Then he looked at us and held out a hand to DNA, “I’m Gold. Who are you?”
DNA looked at me, and I shrugged. He took the man’s hand and shook it. “DNA.”
I held out my left hand and he took it without hesitation and shook it firmly. “Ah, you must have walked away from Ultimate Corp, too,” he said to me, smiling.
I frowned. “Why do you say that?”
He motioned toward me. “Because you’re part made from their stock, and you’re out here.”
“I’m not part . . . I was born . . .” I frowned and shook my head. “I’m not a . . . a product of Ultimate Corp.”
He chuckled. “Suit yourself,” he said patting me on the shoulder. “I didn’t mean to offend, my dear. I think you’re amazing.” He looked beyond me. “Pepper has made friends with your steer.”
I looked back, then I laughed loudly. The dog stood on Carpe Diem’s back and the steer didn’t seem to mind at all. DNA, however, looked irritated. “Don’t worry,” Gold said. “Relax. We are all happy and healthy.” He put two fingers in his mouth and blew a brief sharp whistle. The dog leaped down and came running. “He was raised around cattle,” Gold said. “He’s used to herding them.”
“Well, my steer aren’t inanimate objects,” DNA snapped.
“They didn’t mind, though,” Gold said. “Pepper knows how to tread lightly. Anyway, come, let’s break bread. I have fresh roasted goat meat and fried plantain and I’m happy to share.” He also had a giant red tent he could pitch in seconds that provided us with solid shade and a solar fan. The whole set-up was comfortable and the food he shared was delicious. I hadn’t eaten since the peanuts I’d had yesterday, and with each bite, I felt more like myself. I was about to take a third helping of the goat meat. Instead, I hesitated.
“Eat, eat,” he said. “I’m coming from my sister’s wedding two nights ago. They packed my planter’s cabinet with too much food. Even with the cold of the capture station, it’s so much food that it’ll spoil before I can finish it all.”
I took another piece of goat meat. “Have you always traveled alone?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “My best friend, she used to travel with me. Then she decided she wanted to settle down and start a farm.” He paused and looked at the content cat sleeping in his lap. “That was when I decided to stop planting for Ultimate Corp.”
DNA laughed and nodded.
“What? I don’t get it,” I said.
“This your friend is not from around here,” Gold said to DNA.
“No,” DNA said. “And she hasn’t been here for more than twenty four hours.”
“Miss AO, you will think I’m touched and that is okay. I still explain am to you. You go listen?”
I rolled my eyes at his dramatics. “I go listen,” I said.
“Okay. Miss AO, I’m out here because I have to bear witness to what used to be here. My lady didn’t want to, but that’s above me now. I know I must. I was out here before Ultimate Corp ran everything and everyone out into the desert and into the Red Eye. Then they hired many of us nomads to leave our way of life to earn a salary by planting. We were fools.
“We let them convince us that we had nothing and our lands were useless. If it cannot make money, then it is worthless. That is not our culture, that is capitalism. Yet we still listened. We saw their big cities, we wanted all their nonsense things, we respected their big talk. We learned to prize money over things far more valuable.
“This led to farmers’ letting Ultimate Corp buy their land. They were convinced they were getting something for nothing, the nothing being the land they’d been told was worthless. There was an element of fear, too. Fear of the big people from big faraway places. Goddamn, it was like rolling over and dying. The farmers sold their land, but they stayed to farm it. Where else were they going to go? They were given high tech equipment for farming which made them abandon their old ways. How can you go back to the labor of working the land when now you simply had to press buttons to make the machines do it? Now Ultimate Corp really has them. It’s a mess. My friend, she married one of those farmers. At least with me, she was free.”
He threw his piece of goat meat to his dog who sniffed at it and then slowly began to eat it. Pepper was a well fed dog.
“Everyone who works for it, hates it,” DNA said.
Gold nodded. “But they collect a salary from it. They shop from it. They hate what it does, yet Ultimate Corp continues doing it. It’s something more than human, by Allah. It’s the beast, a djinn. Fire and air, insubstantial, but very real. Human beings created it, but they will never control it.”
We were all quiet after that, except for the sound of Pepper politely gnawing on his piece of goat meat, the cat curled nearby in a most peaceful nap.
Hours after Gold had moved on and we’d walked goodness knew how many more miles, I was still thinking about all he’d said. He took one look at me and thought I was an actual product of Ultimate Corp. I mean, maybe my parts came through them, I thought. But everything came through them. I stopped walking. Did everything come through Ultimate Corp? “Maybe,” I muttered, pinching my chin. I’d never really thought much of it.
“What?” DNA asked.
“Nothing,” I said, starting to walk again.
I was sweating and looking at my feet. The networks of fine metal filaments woven around the heavier central structure gave my joints a flexibility that even made walking in sand easy. And the sand would sift right through. When I walked in mud, because of a special polymer sealant, the mud would slide right off. My feet couldn’t slip on ice, get stuck in muck, stay wet, and I could walk over hot lava and the metal wouldn’t melt. The joints were silent as the wings of an owl. I could jump fifteen feet in the air and land like a ballet dancer. My feet could grip even the tiniest crevice, so I could climb as well as a mountain goat.
So though my legs looked like the skeleton of a half made robot, I was marvelous. Doesn’t matter if my parts came from Ultimate Corp, I thought. I kicked a small mound of sand. When I first got my legs and was recovered enough to actually try them out, I’d crumbled to the ground, and it took three nurses to get me back into the hospital bed. I was closely monitored for weeks because my legs could have set me on fire during the nerve regeneration and fuse phase. All it would have taken was one misfire. It was one of the reasons so few of the disabled opted for even one cybernetic leg transplant, let alone two.
There was a reason I was such an angry child at fifteen. Not only was I full of hormones, ambition, curiosity and zeal, but for most of my fourteenth year of life, my nerves were also almost constantly on fire, and it was because of some freak car accident. That year was like a rebirth. The old me died when my legs were crushed and a new me was slowly reborn.
At first, the hospital bed swallowed me, I was so skinny. With each day, I disappeared more. And I wanted to disappear. Just fade away into the sunshine. Because I was sure that something clearly didn’t want me on this Earth. It had made a mistake in bringing me here, and it was doing everything it could to right its wrong.
My bed was beside the window, and my parents made sure that I was in the sunlight every day, the AC in the room keeping me cool and comfortable. I’d sit there, my pain numbed, flattened, and made strange by drugs, and stare at the dust floating about in the sunbeam shining on me. I wished I were one of those specks of dust. Insignificant, clean, free. However, as time progressed, it was as if I passed through a wall of fire. I told my doctors to take me off the drugs. My parents didn’t even realize it because I told them nothing about it, and I seemed quite normal. Better than normal. I was making progress.
I began standing up on my new legs, to my physical therapist’s delight. Then I was taking steps. Then I was walking around the hospital. My physical therapist couldn’t wait to tell my parents how I’d walked all the way to the end of the parking lot on the gravelly median between the cars. Uneven surfaces were the toughest. All this I did while enduring pain so intense that it was like existing close to a white hot sun.
There was no way to adjust to my cybernetic legs without enduring the pain as the nerves regenerated. That’s how I became so adept with my legs and later my arm. My doctor verified this for me. She said that it’s something they don’t like to tell transplant patients like myself, that in order to truly master usage, you had to die another death by pain. This is why most with cybernetic parts can move better than any organic human but few truly master the technology’s potential. What doctor would tell their patient that they have to endure pain three times worse than childbirth, a pain that lasts for over half a year?
By the time I was sixteen, I understood so much about myself and the darkness that life can bring. I wanted to dwell in the light. Not as a speck of dust, but as a raging teen interested in touching everything. And I never forgot the pain of that awful year of life.
A flare of a headache hit me so hard that I stumbled and screamed. “Ah, here it is again,” I groaned, grabbing my head. DNA rushed to me and when I looked at him, it was as if I were looking through a cascade of blood. Everything was tinted red and pulsing like my heart’s beat. And I was smelling it, too. Coppery and sweet. Am I bleeding?
“AO, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know! My head . . .” I opened my mouth and took in as much air as I could. It tasted of blood.
“We’re close to my village. About a mile,” he said. “Can you make it?”
I was sinking. Into the ground and into my head. I was only half aware of him helping me climb onto Carpe Diem. The breeze. Carpe Diem’s momentum. DNA jogging in front of us, I felt like I’d descended further into wilderness.
Up ahead, all I glimpsed through the red haze was more desert. If his nomadic village were nearby, it must have been very very small. I’d been looking ahead into the distance, beyond DNA when it happened. Now everything was going dark and quiet and calm.
I heard myself exhale, then the red veil lifted. And the headache . . . no, the headache didn’t stop exactly. There was a rupture in my head and it was followed by a feeling of liquidy warmth. An almost sweet sting. Then a looseness. Gradually, I felt better. I twisted around and rested my chin on Carpe Diem’s furry head. “Oh,” I whispered, looking ahead, past DNA walking with GPS. “How did I not see that?”