Feb 25, 2057, 0720 Hours (UTC +3)

Addis Ababa, Pan-Republic of the Horn

T.O.C.U. Deployment Complex

“Partied hard?” Araari asked Tarik when he walked into the briefing meeting with an ice bag on his head.

“Something like that,” he mumbled, sitting beside Araari at the front of the room.

Both General Zenawi and Lieutenant General Kahinu were present and standing in front of an idling projector. Zenawi was tall, lean, and trying his best to hide excitement below his thick mustache while Kahinu was shorter and more portly and wore an anxious frown like a shriveled worm. Araari did not like what she saw. Zenawi loved nothing more than a good war or disaster, while Kahinu, like herself, preferred peace.

Once the pilots, senior officers, and geologists were all present, MPs bolted the soundproof doors. Zenawi flicked on the projector which displayed charts of dense geological data.

“Good morning, everyone. I hope everyone but Captain Haile has slept well, and I hope he has slept at all,” Zenawi said.

The comment was greeted with chuckles from members of The Pride, though not by Tarik himself who managed only an obligatory smile. Nor from Kahinu, face fixed with anxiousness.

“So, what are we looking at. What you see before you now is geological data collected in the week leading up to the appearance of the Monolith. Dr. Abdullahi, would you like to explain the significance of this data?” Zenawi said.

The hunched Somali geologist stood up from the front row of folding chairs and faced the audience with a look of the gentlest condescension he could muster then cleared his throat.

“In the top left we have a zoomed-out view of seismological activity in the Central Sahara near the Chad-Libya border from 12 February to 19 February. You can see the amplitude of the seismograph increases arithmetically, that is, in a straight line, without decreasing, over several days. The Earth likes to shake, but she doesn’t usually do so in such an orderly manner. She prefers one-night flings to long-term relationships,” Dr. Abdullahi said.

The officers found this amusing. Araari thought the linguistic flourish was unnecessary. Oddly, it seemed the exact sort of thing to draw Tarik’s attention, but her fellow pilot was uninterested. Distracted, even.

“Beside this chart you will see a satellite image of where this seismographic activity was detected. The overlapping circles are divided by color and day. All these little purple circles represent localized activity on the 12th, and blue, green, yellow, orange, red the succeeding days. You will note as the circles grow larger, they grow fewer, and by the 18th, we have this single white circle representing a unified node of seismic activity. This, gentlemen… and lady, is our monolith.

Dr. Abdullahi excitedly stabbed his finger at the projector screen causing it to wiggle like the diagram of an earthquake. He went on to explain a few other data points of considerably less interest to anyone besides his team of three other geologists from the Institute of Geophysics, Space Science and Astronomy. General Zenawi clicked to the next slide.

“And the P-Waves show— ah. Thank you, general. How kind of you,” Dr. Abdullahi said.

This slide was a satellite image of nondescript desert terrain with directional markers indicating proximity to off-map points of interest. Eight kilometers west by northwest was the Sudanese city of Kassala. Eight kilometers east was the border between Sudan and the Pan-Republic of the Horn. Purple circles spattered the map at random points.

“This was taken yesterday around 17:00. Once again, the purple circles indicate localized seismic activity. We have also observed a long-interval increase in seismographic amplitude. I believe you can all connect the dots.”

The room fell silent and it became possible to hear the discipline which restrained the officers from shouting or asking questions. Araari too kept silent, but something sour and hard climbed up her throat. Unable to keep it inside, it spilled out of her.

“There’s more than one Monolith…”

“That is indeed our theory, Colonel,” Dr. Abdullahi said.

“We haven’t even figured out how to deal with the first!” Tarik said.

“Well, the Egyptians have given us a shining example of what not to do, and for that we must be grateful,” Zenawi replied, making a cross with his index finger and thumb as though to thank God for the Egyptians’ failed operation.

Mashallah indeed, thought Araari, that Egyptian soldiers gave their lives to help understand these Monoliths. But she suspected Zenawi’s thankfulness ended at the part where Egyptian soldiers gave up their lives.

“General Zenawi and I will direct preparation efforts,” Lieutenant General Kahinu said in his scratchy voice. “If Dr. Abdullahi’s estimates are correct, we can expect another Monolith by the 3rd of March. We are working with his team to discover ways to abort the maturation process before the Monolith fully forms. In the meantime, Chairwoman Mestawot has agreed to mobilize Northern Command and its tank and artillery battalions for a worst case scenario. Similarly, we are activating the TOCU Division and the process of moving the units to the Sudanese border will begin as soon as this meeting is over. Captain Haile will remain on stand-by in case our Monolith develops faster than expected. Colonel Ahmed…”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

He turned to her, meeting her with his watery blue eyes. “We’ll speak afterwards. I have a separate assignment for you.”

The meeting concluded with a short question segment which involved Zenawi, Kahinu, or Dr. Abdullahi telling the assembled officers that they did not have answers at this time. Once the meeting was over, Lieutenant General Kahinu called Araari over and spoke to her privately in an unused communications office with soundproof walls.

“You’re not going to like this order, but it’s coming down from the Chairwoman,” Kahinu told her.

“I will wager with you that I already know what it is,” Araari replied, rubbing her stomach where she could feel her baby kicking. “Chairwoman Mestawot wants me to have another try at convincing Ciham Isak. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“I told her there’s no chance and she didn’t listen. I know this feels like a waste of time, Colonel, but the truth is that we have no God-forsaken idea what we’re going to do about this Monolith and all that stuff in the meeting was to save face. Right now we have one empty TOCU and no one to pilot it, and while we’re all kneeling and praying to God these scientists with their heads full of rocks can figure out what to do, at least we can try again with Isak. Consider this a request, not an order,” Kahinu said.

The familiarity between Araari and Kahinu would have shocked anyone else in the military. A Lieutenant General had no reason to request something he could order. However, the two of them were close because they thought alike. Both Siye Kahinu and Araari Ahmed were Pan-Democrats on a spiritual level and not merely a professionally-expedient one.

The average citizen of the PRH thought that Pan-Democracy had been achieved in the Horn, and that constant tinkering with the government would lead to anarchy and power-grabs. Kahinu and Araari, on the other hand, saw in that constant tinkering the essence of Pan-Democracy. A flowing river which washed away pollution. It was precisely complacency and the acceptance that things were as good as they would get that had brought about the collapse of the old liberal world order and left it a skeleton with the United States for a spine. The same thing could happen in the Pan-Republic. All it took was for people to become convinced the revolution was completed.

This formulation of change had been borrowed from the part of Pan-Democracy’s DNA which came from 20th-century communism, a part Araari vociferously denied for matters of presentability. But the rectification of the previous century’s sins with its virtues demanded letting go of fixed institutions and accepting on faith the ability of the civic population to arrive at provisional answers to perpetually-changing questions.

This was why it was so difficult to teach Pan-Democracy in public schools, and why even people who grew up through all 12 years of mandatory education still did not fully grasp its implications. Simply put, Pan-Democracy was an attitude towards humanity, ideological in conviction, pragmatic in practice, which demanded nothing and asked everything of its subjects. No one was fully happy with it. No one ever would be happy with it. But it didn’t collapse, and the less anyone tried to replicate previous success or put into words precisely what or who had succeeded and how, the better it worked. The only person who had come close to explaining it in words was its originator: Leo Maublanc, and his book on the subject had used as much poetry as prose.

This singular, shared conviction broke down the distance between Kahinu and Araari and allowed the two to act as a single force within the military they were advocating to democratize.

“I’ll go see her,” Araari said. “Do they want me to fly to Massawa right away?”

“There’s a V-30 waiting on the roof. If you're fast, you could be back for lunch.”

As Araari walked out through the labyrinth of auxiliary offices, sounds of mobilization grew louder. The TOCUs had been fueled and armed earlier that week when the first Monolith appeared, but now began the much larger project of bringing the TOCUs across the country. She noticed with mixed-feelings that they were mobilizing the pilot-less HDU Sheba before she had even had spoken with its prospective pilot, Ciham Isak.

Wading through the sea of support personnel swimming, Araari was stopped by a hand tapping on her shoulder. She turned to find Tarik Haile looking even more hungover and miserable than during the meeting.

“Araari, can we talk? It won’t take long,” he said. All of his usual boyish cheekiness was gone.

“Walk with me. We can talk on the elevator,” she said.

She punched a few extra floors to make the ride take longer. Tarik said he wouldn’t need it, but as soon as it was time for him to articulate what he wanted to say, nothing came out. At around Access Floor 4 he finally managed some words.

“What… do you think… or maybe, how would you respond if I said Pan-Democracy felt too… I don’t know, soft? Unsatisfying? Like maybe it tries too hard to scrub out all the dirt people have, and—”

“Tarik,” she said.

“Yes ma’am?”

“You would have been four during the revolution? So you don’t remember what it was like before, I imagine,” Araari said.

Tarik shook his head. “No ma’am.”

She looked up to the ceiling for a moment and exhaled through her nose. “It was bad. Even if we called ourselves a Democracy after DERG, the only thing that really mattered was whether you had power or not. The armed forces, the organization you are now a part of, was a barely-organized gang of thugs who could get away with everything except messing with Christians and rich people. So that dirt you want to let loose again? Do you know what it is? It’s a carload of troops raping my aunt on the way home from work. It’s soldiers beating an old man in my village to death because they thought he was charging too much for spices. It looks like poverty and starvation right outside of a beautiful airport.”

She looked into his eyes and saw an existential weariness. Her answer didn’t satisfy him, but that was good. It meant Tarik was finally mature enough to ask uncomfortable questions about the world around him. She had no plans to force her own answers on him, answers formed from decades of her own inner struggle which would continue to evolve for decades to come, God-willing. But what she could do was tell him where the dead-ends lay.

“You should keep asking yourself what you meant when you asked that,” Araari said as the elevator disappeared into solid stone en route to the roof. “But as for my own answer to whether our approach to politics is… what did you say? Soft? No. I think it’s a very hard thing to continually refresh ourselves and fight the force of complacency. As for unsatisfying…”

The elevator dinged and opened to a roof where industrial sounds gave way to the blowing wind. A V-30 was waiting for Araari on the other end. Before stepping off she turned back to Tarik.

“Maybe.”