“What is that?” I asked. It was a soft but steady buzz that started the moment we stepped up to the building. We’d stepped into some sort of gentle electrical field, a feeling I was actually quite used to with all my cybernetic parts.
“You’re being scanned,” Force said. “I know, it feels weird. Some feel it more than others, but everyone feels it. It’s why we call them Mosquito Huts. They buzz in your ear and take a bit of your blood.”
“Ah, my ‘blood’ being my information.”
“Yep.” He had to really put his shoulder into shoving the heavy door open. I probably should have helped him. It was solid stone. And when it opened, warm air wafted out like the breath of a beast.
“They made these structures like apocalyptic fortresses in case there’s ever an anti-aejej outage,” he said.
I blinked, stepping in after him. “Oh goodness! Has that ever happened here?”
Inside the concrete hut was more concrete, except for the tree-trunk thick steel pole that ran through and out and up into the sky. It was surrounded by a chunky concrete spiral stair case.
“Yes, some years ago. I wasn’t here for it, thank goodness. There was some sort of breach. To this day no one knows who or what it was. I’ll always suspect Ultimate Corp because the Hour Glass had ended its business in this region not long before.”
“You mean The Reckoning? The outage happened right after that happened?”
He nodded.
“So what happened when the anti-aejej went off?”
He chuckled as we ascended the staircase. “What do you think? Deadly chaos. Thankfully there was about a minute warning, so most could get their asses inside, or switch on their own personal antis, but my God, so many were lost to the winds that day. Men, women, children. It’s the risk we all take living here.”
I followed him closely as we went up the stairs. “A risk worth taking?”
“Definitely.”
I gasped when I entered the room that was the small top floor of the hut. “But on the outside this place is . . .” I sighed and just stared. It wasn’t even like looking through windows. It was as if we’d stepped outside. I could see across the city, I could look up into the darkening turbulent sky. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re looking at screens,” he said.
I stepped up to what looked like the edge of the roof. My feet touched a barrier, but my eyes couldn’t tell that it was a screen. I reached out and pressed my fingertips to it. It was warm.
“And only the inside of this power hut has all these crazy screens It’s the Hour Glass’s main hub,” he said. “I not only built this, I run it. With a team, of course.”
“Really?”
“Yes. My skills have improved since we last talked.”
“Did you build the programming that resets and protects the Hour Glass, too?”
“Hell no,” he said, laughing hard. “That was built by Maiduguri, the low level AI who still runs this place. Maiduguri was created by one of the first groups to come here.” He sat on the well-worn couch in the center of the room. “Sit, AO.”
I walked around the room first. Touching the screen, marveling at its realism up close, thinking and ignoring the pounding in my ears and neck. In the back of my mind, I could see the pomegranate of eyes. This room was live with wifi. I sat beside him, staring at the pigeon sitting on the edge of the hut. So wildlife, at least the kind often referred to as “rats with wings,” lived in the Hour Glass, too. Had they been introduced here, or were they, too, refugees?
“What?”
He looked at me, and I looked at his face up close. I’d analyzed every detail of this face years ago when I couldn’t move, when I was in so much pain, when I didn’t know what I was or could be. His full lips with the delicate crease in the middle, his high cheekbones that showed off the power of his bloodline, and the brown spot in the white of his left eye, all had given me comfort. He looked the same, just older and more him.
“What did they do to you?” he asked.
I smiled and shook my head. “I did this to me,” I said. “It was all my choice.”
“Being born crippled and then being mangled by a damn car?”
“The part after all that,” I snapped.
“You have a twisted idea of what choice is,” he said. “My choice was dropping my whole life to be king of some small kingdom or being disowned.”
I wiped my face with my hands and groaned. I knew what he was asking. “I don’t know, Force.”
“Well, tell me about it, then.”
“I just said I don’t know.”
“You know. I know you.”
“You don’t know me anymore,” I said.
“Men attacked you in your local market while you were shopping and you killed them all with your bare hands in front of thirty-one people. Oh I definitely still know you.”
“I don’t know exactly what happened,” I said. “I’m not a murderer. Those men would have killed me.”
“I know.” He paused. “I watched it several times, closely. But what happened to you?”
DNA and the steer were back at Force’s outdoor home. For the moment, we were all safe. It was time to face what I didn’t want to face. I groaned again, and even then I knew that they heard. “They always hear now,” I said, curling over myself. I pressed my face to my hard knees. I curled my arms around myself. And I wailed. For the first time, I accepted it, opened myself to it. I wailed into my knees until my lungs burned, my organic intestines turned, my human heart beat so hard that I felt dizzy. When I opened my eyes, everything was blurred.
Force’s hands were on my shoulders, gently pressing me down. “Shhhh, AO, shhhh, calm down.” He sat back and reached for something on the floor. Then I felt him reach into my shirt. “Don’t move,” he said. I trusted him enough to not tear his head off. “Sit back. Breathe. If I think what’s happening is happening, your life depends on it. Breathe. Deep breaths.”
I could feel my heart slamming in my chest, everything was crowding me, I opened my mouth wide. “Inhale,” I heard him say. “Like you are the Red Eye itself!” I inhaled. “Your blood pressure is class three,” he muttered. “Calm yourself.”
I breathed. My mouth wide. I imagined the chaos of the Red Eye. Wind moving in every direction. Suctioning my thoughts like one of its many whirlwinds. Whoooooooooooooooo. Then I exhaled a storm. Haaaaaaaaaaaaa.
“That’s it, my love, that’s it,” I heard him say. I could hear his fingers tapping. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was typing on a large tablet. The beat of my heart simulated on its screen, along with my blood pressure and other diagnostics. At least ten minutes had passed because he said, “ I analyzed that footage of what happened in that Abuja market. You coughed, like in that moment, you had a hard time breathing.”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”
“I just put a diagnostic tab on your chest,” he said. “And now I see that what I suspected was correct.” He put up a hand. “Relax, you’re better now. Don’t let this, uh, surprise you too much but your blood pressure is just shy of a full on heart attack. But you’re better now, you’re better now.”
Heart attack, I thought. “Is that why I feel my pulse so strongly in my ears?” He nodded. “And the headaches,” I said. “Like a drum beat.” When was the last time I had my blood pressure checked? Or maybe it got bad when I killed those men. I kissed my teeth. What did it matter? “I think . . . I can talk to them.”
“Talk to who?”
“The AI. All of them. Around the world, in space, all the programs, software. Even the Hour Glass’s AI Maiduguri.” I paused. “And I think I can make them do what I want.”
He didn’t believe me. Even after I told him how DNA and I escaped the warehouse, Force chose to believe his theories and logical scientific explanations, instead. He said it was all just my high blood pressure and coincidence. The high blood pressure and stress interfered with my perception of what was happening around me. In the meantime, the corporation decided that a public execution of someone as damaged as me was bad press. He was sure that the Nigerian government may have done something to me, and they’d ordered the corporation to back off so they could retrieve their specimen.
Anything but me being a living wireless connection, simultaneously human and machine; the result of an abnormal amount of flesh to machine wiring, some random glitch caused by the combination of violence inflicted on my body, and subsequent rage.
“It’s been too much for you,” he said still looking at his tablet. “All of it. Years of it. The surgeries, the artificial parts, what comes with all that. Look at these numbers. Your heart is still flesh, it can die.”
“I don’t CARE.” We were quiet for a moment. I felt better now. I took more deep breaths. Those definitely helped. Steady even breaths. I took a bit more time. Then I went in . . .
Dusty dirt roads . . .
Some paved with fresh black asphalt, but mostly dusty . . .
Few cars, even fewer autonomous vehicles. It was locating the small Ondo state town I still remembered that led me to the building I sought. The mosque didn’t look like a mosque and the church across the street looked like someone’s modest home. There was a small shop down the road from the mosque where you could still buy goods like chewing gum, incense sticks, and cigarettes with actual cash. And Force’s family’s palace was right beside the mosque.
All this I showed Force on the screens around us that were normally used for lectures, surveillance, and programming. Screens that Force had control of and that I, according to him, didn’t. “I still remember the name of your town. That’s why I can show it to you. I tell them the name and they find the satellite images. What I’m showing you is your town a few years ago. When I thought you had committed suicide and your family told me they didn’t want me at your funeral because your death was my fault.”
“They told you that?”
“Yes.” I opened my eyes and glared at him. All around us was Ikare, Ondo State, Nigeria. There was the palace where Force was born, where he had apparently never gone when I thought he had. I made the images move a bit as if we were walking on foot through his home. I watched him as I did this, it was that easy. The Control. “I’m doing all this. I ask and they obey me, indulge me, whatever.”
“Okay,” he said, a blank look of shock on his face. “So who is obeying or indulging you? Who is ‘they’?”
“They’re a sentience, the Internet? No more than that. They’re digital and ubiquitous. In my mind, they look like eyes, fruit, a pomegranate.” I glanced at him and then quickly glanced away, not liking how he was looking at me. I shook my head. “I can’t explain.” I switched the image to my face, as if I were looking at him from all around, five of my faces from the various angles of the cameras in the room, looking at him. I could feel the drums in my temples, and I took a deep breath. “Whether you believe me or not, I can do this,” I said.
“Okay,” he said again. “Stop, for now. Your heart rate is increasing.”
I stopped and sat back, breathing deeply.
“How?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s easy?”
“Minus the risk of heart attack, yes.”
“What about your herdsman friend, DNA? Is he involved?”
“That part is strange coincidence.”
He shook his head. “No.”
I shrugged.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re safe here,” he said.
“I’m not safe anywhere.”
“Yes,” he said. “But if what you tell me is true, if you can do this . . . this thing, they’re going to want you.”
“Who? The government? I’m not . . .”
“No, Ultimate Corp. And you should fear them more than the government.”
“I’ll know when they all are coming.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Even if you can control all AI, all software, you’re still human. You can’t be everywhere at once, talking to everyone at once, preparing for everything at once. When you look one way, they’ll come at you another.”
I frowned. “Maybe.”
“There’s something else,” he said. He sighed. “How’s your mother?”
I chuckled. “Fine. My mom and my dad, well, as fine as they could be knowing all that’s going on.”
“Your mother loved olives,” he said. “I remember that.”
I laughed. “Of course you’d know that. What about it?”
Force and my mother had always had an interesting rapport, which made his leaving all the more profound. They simply enjoyed sitting and talking. Some days, when I was in my worst pain, unable to talk, Force would come over, and he and my mother would sit and just talk. Listening to them made me feel better, though it also made me feel left out.
“I know too much,” he said, looking away. He got up and walked to the edge of the room. When he turned back to me, I felt ill.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
I frowned more deeply. “Know what?”
“Olives.”
“What about olives?” I snapped.
“Ultimate Corp sold almost all the olives in Nigeria, they still do. Some two decades ago, there was a small batch of Beldi olives that they grew in Morocco. I never told you, but I researched this when we were sixteen. Those trees were genetically modified to grow in higher density and with a spicy black-peppery taste. They were wildly popular here, you put them in jollof rice, Indomie, ate them as a snack. Unfortunately, these olives were later proven to cause birth defects if one ate too many of them. They recalled all those Beldi olives, it was big news. For about a day. Then it wasn’t. What never made the news was that five pregnant women in Nigeria ate too many.” He paused, and when I just stared at him, he continued. “There were five born like you. Two died days later, though I’m not really sure if their deaths were natural, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” I whispered. They’d most likely been euthanized. Probably with their parents’ consent. The only alternative was having a “demon” child.
“Aside from you, two had parents who agreed to a few cybernetic organs. But those parents were Christian Pentecostals, so their religious and cultural beliefs made them reject the most important ones. So one of them died around the age of two and the one who survived, aside from you, remains the . . .” he took a deep breath.
“Say it,” I said.
“Shameful family secret,” he said after a moment.
“Still alive?”
“If you want to call that life,” he said. “So you were the only one who chose to walk into the fire. They could never get anyone to volunteer for what you’ve been through—”
“I’m an experiment,” I blurted.
He looked sad as he said it. “Yes. And they can say you volunteered for it.”
“Fuck!” I screamed. I frowned, calming myself. “So . . . so, they knew pregnant women would eat those fucking olives? They wanted them to?! To cause mutations in their unborn children? So . . . so. . . . they made me need all my augmentations?! Then they gave me access to it, and then they monitored me?”
“Definitely.”
“Okay,” I said. Full capacity. A shiver flew from my feet to the top of my head. I opened my mouth to catch my breath. “Stop!” I screamed. Thump, thump, thump, in my ears.
“I researched it all,” he whispered. “Found solid answers.”
I inhaled deeply, concentrating on my heartbeat, trying to dodge the realization that was slipping into my consciousness no matter how I tried to keep it out. I managed to slow my heart’s rhythm, but I couldn’t keep out the information Force had just dumped on me. “Because of olives,” I said, my eyes closed, my fingertips pressed to my temples.
“She still had one of the jars.”
“She kept it? All these years?” I asked.
He nodded.
“So she knew,” I said. “She must have researched, too.”
“Or they’d visited your home when you were born, and your parents never told you.”
So Ultimate Corp was responsible for me being born as I was. Then the government was responsible for enthusiastically giving me whatever augmentation I requested. I thought about the car accident years later. An autonomous vehicle. An accident that the news feeds and engineers said had never happened before. That was so rare it was anomalous. An accident that shouldn’t have happened. Maybe that was them pushing me further, to see what more they could do. They must have been delighted every time I petitioned for something. I’d made their job easy. No wonder my petitions were always accepted. I’d thought I was just lucky, applying at the right time, stating my need in the right way. “Shit,” I said.
“Yeah. Shit.”
I couldn’t keep the tears from dribbling from my eyes. I wiped them away with the back of my flesh hand. Thump thump thump, the beat of my brother’s drums in my ears. I saw flashes of what I did to those men. And then my vision blurred as, for the first time, I remembered in full. I’d crushed the beautiful man’s throat with my cybernetic hand as I looked him in the face. The sound and feeling of it echoed in my mind. And once the memory was there, it didn’t leave this time. It stayed. It stayed. Oh it stayed. “God,” I muttered, barring my teeth, clenching my fist. Thump, thump, thump. I welcomed it.
I got up and walked to the screen. I was now taking us through a dense jungle. I stopped and stared at it. I liked this place. It was like being able to see what was on my mind as it was on my mind. “They’ll kill us both, eventually.”
“Not if you kill them first.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious, Anwuli. Maybe it’s time you stopped running. Turn and face your pursuers. Just think about it.” He got up. “They won’t find you any time soon. The Hour Glass is still the Hour Glass. You’re definitely the most valuable person to come through here, but you aren’t the most dangerous.”
“I find that oddly comforting.”
“Heh, that’s why few people who come to live in the Hour Glass ever leave.”
A black box opened in the center of the screen. Inside it, in bright red, was 1:10. Then it began counting upwards. Less than a minute until it was 1:11, the Reset, the time when all data in all clouds and networks going out and coming into the Hour Glass was wiped and everything restarted. Sand began to blow across all the screens and it was so realistic looking and sounding, that I actually started feeling wind! I looked at the floor to make sure there was nothing hitting my feet. It increased and soon the image of outside was awash in sand. Everything but the counting clock.
When it reached 1:11, it all went black. Force sat back down on the couch. “Have a seat for a second.” As I sat beside him, windows began to open up all over the screens. Three-hundred-sixty degrees of current news. It was so overwhelming that I laughed out loud. All the people speaking, all the images, all the motion, all the urgency, all the emotion, from all over Africa. Now now now. It was so similar to what it was like to close my eyes and reach out, except for one thing; I was looking, seeing, hearing, but no one was looking back at me as I did so. And I couldn’t interact.
I was in the middle of one of Africa’s worst disasters worrying about being hunted down by one of the world’s biggest corporations and my own government. Yet, the rest of Africa was going about its business as usual. Elections were being held in Ghana. There were protests for gay rights in Kenya again. The latest Oracle Solar farm, this one in Chad, was now online. There was a new rap group in Algeria taking the world by storm. Drone deliveries in Mali were going so well that this was the fifth month without a single mishap.
We were both quiet as we caught up with the rest of Africa. And that must have been how I saw it. Out of all the hundreds of stories all around me, I saw it. A smaller box. Maybe because the male newscaster was standing in a place so empty, sand dunes behind him. A familiar sight. It caught my eye. “. . . this small nomadic village could never have seen it coming,” the newscaster was saying. Without thinking, I brought it forth and expanded it to a size I could see clearly.
As the anchorperson spoke, I zoomed the focus in on those behind him. As I did it, I held up my hands and parted them as if I were opening up a large map. There. “That’s DNA’s mother,” I said. She looked confused and her hair was in disarray, her skin dirty with soot.
“At approximately 2 AM this morning,” the anchorperson said, “. . . this village was set upon by their own. It is believed that this is the home village of the fugitive herdsman at large, Dangote Nuhu Adamu. In these remote parts of Nigeria, as we saw from yesterday’s failed capture of the herdsman Adamu and the murderess Okwudili, it is difficult for authorities to quell lawlessness. Bukkaru, the United Fulani Tribal Council elders, a godchild of the organization known as Miyetti Allah, authorized this attack. And there were casualties. This small village was razed to the ground. And still, Adamu was not caught . . . .”
Behind the anchorperson, DNA’s mother was being hugged by, yes, DNA’s journalist brother. He too was dirty with soot. Where was DNA’s sister? “DNA will be angry,” I muttered.
“I’m sure,” Force said. “And this makes three groups that are after you two now.”
“Do they ever go after the actual terrorists?”
“If Ultimate Corp can pay people off to stop living the way they’ve been living for hundreds of years to, instead, plant trees in the parts of the north that aren’t engulfed in the Red Eye, they can pay off the Bukkaru to go after one of their own.”
“We barely escaped them,” I said. “My God. What would they have done to us?”
“Necklace you, watch you burn, and then thrown your bones in the Red Eye to fly forever.”
I stared at Force, my mouth hanging open.
“I’ve heard of desert folk doing that to their worst criminals,” he said with a shrug. “At least you can rest easy knowing they won’t come here. Tribals don’t come to the Hour Glass unless they’re outcast.”
I got up. “I have to tell DNA.”
Force raised a hand and all the screens popped away and we were back to being surrounded by the outdoors. “Yeah, let’s get back.” He paused. “I’m sorry, AO. For both of you. Neither of you deserves this shit.”
I looked into his eyes and then turned to the door. “It’s all right,” I said, my voice husky. If I had looked at him a moment longer, I’d have burst into tears. The days when I leaned on Force were long gone. Still, as we headed down the stairs, my chest was tight with grief. No, neither of us deserved this shit. “When’s the last time you saw the sun?” I asked. I needed to change the subject.
“Real or artificial? There are sun dome restaurants and small parks with lights that create sunshine here that looks even more real than the real thing.”
“When’s the last time you saw the real sun?”
“About five years.”
I thought about this conversation well into the night.