Sun 09/11 18:12:48 PDT
Father’s jet looms above us, the boxy robot from the SynTech logo smiling down at us from its side. A warm breeze blows in from the vast tracts of sand around our private airstrip.
“Have any of you ever flown on this?” I whisper to my favorite brother.
“No,” Evan replies. “We’ve never flown on anything before.”
The tail lights of the cars that brought us out here fade out then disappear off in the distance toward the campus. I wander over next to Louise and hear her breathing, deep and slow. She’s keeping herself together. Marc continues his monologue about how excited he is to no one in particular. Finally, the door of the jet swings open and Father emerges.
“All aboard!” he calls.
He didn’t need to say a word. As soon as he appeared, we all started rushing upwards. Even Jeff takes the stairs two at a time. Inside, the plane looks nothing like the commercial jets I’ve flown in before. The main cabin with its cushy reclining chairs surrounding a long thin table reminds me more of a corporate boardroom than anything.
“Welcome to my Airbus A318 Elite,” Father says in his most gracious voice. “It was my first real splurge once SynTech took off. Even buying it used, I paid a small fortune for her. She’s also the only all-electric jet of its kind, thanks to some modifications of my own design, which cost another fortune to get approved. But a man needs a few vices.” He smiles his crooked smile.
I wonder if it’s less impressive for my siblings who have never known the joy of packing like sardines into the coach section of commercial flights. For me, this embodies a life of luxury I’ve only seen in movies. I grab one of the empty seats and settle in.
“I love this jet,” Father says wistfully. “Back when I worked for a living, not long after I took my company public, I used to fly my company’s board to retreats on her. We’d discuss strategy right here at this table. We would always end up getting as much work done here on the way there as we did the rest of the trip. Please, go ahead and get comfortable. This is going to be a long flight. It will be almost twenty-four hours before we land in Djibouti.”
A trim blonde woman emerges from the back of the jet. “All set back here, Tom,” she announces. “We can go whenever you’re ready.”
“My children,” Father says, directing an open hand in her direction, “this is Cindy. She’s been taking care of me while I travel for years now, and she’ll take good care of all of you as well. Cindy, I’d like you to meet Evan, Noah, Louise, Andrea, Jeff, Marc, and Chad.” He points to each of us as he names us off.
“Well it’s just so nice to meet y’all! Tom’s been bragging on you for as long as I can remember.” She puts a hand on his arm and gives it a squeeze. “Now, some announcements: Bob and Brian will be our flight crew today. They’re up front, but unless you bump into one of them coming to or from the restroom you probably won’t see much of them. There is a bedroom with a set of bunks in the back if you need to lie down. Did everyone have a good dinner before you came on board?”
We all nod, even though I know most of us were too nervous to take more than a few bites in the cafeteria.
“Good,” she says, flashing white teeth behind her bright red lips. “Then the next meal will be breakfast, but if any of you want any snacks or drinks, you just let me know.”
“They’re fine for now, Cindy,” Father answers for us. “Thank you.”
“Then let me take care of the bit that I have to say. The seatbelts on your seats should be buckled while we take off and land. If the weather gets choppy, the pilots will let us know and you can buckle in for safety. The exits are the way you came in or the two emergency exits, that one there or the one in the back there. Any questions?”
She flashes her ruby-red smile again and looks around at us.
“I don’t have any questions, but you sure are pretty,” Marc says.
Thanks Marc, now she thinks we’re freaks.
“Oh, aren’t you sweet!” she laughs, handling his awkwardness amazingly well. “Tom, you didn’t tell me you had a little charmer in training. I can see you’ve been raising these boys well.”
”Thank you,” Father says as he shakes his head in obvious embarrassment. I’m glad I’m not the only one mortified.
Cindy disappears into the back of the jet and Father turns to address us. “You’ll all need to put your clouds into sleep mode if you haven’t yet. I know, I know. The frequencies we use don’t affect the controls, but they still insist on it. Once your bots are asleep, please hand me your phones and I’ll power them down. Even the minimal signals they use to communicate with the implants aren’t allowed. They’ll have to stay off the whole trip. I’ll return them to you when we get there.”
SLEEP-MODE
Tue 09/13 07:38:48 EAT
SynTech OS v.3.0.2.0462
IMPLANT INTERFACE INITIALIZED
There we go, feeling normal again now. I didn’t realize what it would do to have the implant powered down. It’s like having a limb removed. Not painful, just missing. Worse yet, I had to do my own remembering for a whole day.
“All up and running?” Father asks.
“Yeah, the overlay is up,” I report. “The setting all seems right. Everything looks good.”
“Double check your bots and make sure they’re responding as well, please.”
LIGHT-SHOW
I gesture with my right hand and light up a spinning cluster of red, blue and green spheres above my fingertips, courtesy of code I stole from my sister.
“Impressive, though that looks like something Andrea would make.”
Oops. Maybe too blatant of a copy. I tweaked the colors and physics a little from the original, but I should probably have customized it more.
“Yeah,” I say, looking over at her. “Her designs definitely inspired it.”
She looks back and just gives me one of her radiant smiles, taking my supposed imitation as a compliment. Father shrugs and starts on the next sibling in line, running his diagnostics and bringing Jeff’s implant back up. That will take a while, which is fine. I need to get some things written down that happened while I couldn’t live-journal them.
I’m worried about Louise. That girl is a straight-up junkie.
She did fine for the first few hours. The whole trip had kind of a road-trip-meets-game-night feel to it. We put on some old movies in the background while we played card games, ate snacks, and just kind of hung out. Then, around bedtime, she started getting irritable. No, irritable isn’t the right word. Angry. Snapping at everyone. At that point we were playing poker with M&Ms for money. It turns out Chad sucks at it, but Marc is surprisingly good at bluffing. Anyway, everyone was getting along, playing, joking, and having a good time. I even forgot that I needed to take down Father for a little while.
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But then Louise got that look.
I knew a guy back in Colorado that got into some harder drugs, like more than just weed. Not a friend, just a guy I’d see around at school. You could tell what he was up to, it wasn’t rocket science to figure it out. He skipped school a lot. When he came in, he was either smiling and quiet, or he had this look on his face. Not quite hunger, not quite anger, but some of both mixed with a whole lot of desperation. It was a distinctive expression that I hadn’t ever seen on anyone else. Until yesterday on the plane when Louise got that look.
She excused herself after snapping at everyone a few dozen times and headed back to the bedroom in the back. She said she had a headache. I went and checked on her an hour later. She was sitting in the dark on the edge of one of the bunks, looking pale, digging her nails into her palms. I could see where they were starting to bleed. Her lower lip was purpling up with bruises where she was biting it. Her hair was damp with sweat. And that look. That junkie look.
Dammit, Louise.
It all clicked then. Louise is an addict to whatever she’s been doing with her implant to release dopamine or whatever it was. It had barely been eight hours without it, and she was already showing withdrawal symptoms. With our implants disabled, she couldn’t get her fix.
“You know what’s going on, right?” I asked her quietly.
“Shut up,” she snapped.
I knelt down on the floor next to her and waited, silent.
“Yeah, I think so,” she said finally.
“Breathe,” I told her, trying to keep my voice reassuring and not furious at her for doing this to herself. “Like with your panic attacks.”
“OK.”
She breathed with the slow, deep breaths she had practiced. Again. Again.
“Are you nauseous?” I asked. “I hear that happens with withdrawal.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Everything just hurts. And I hate everyone right now.”
“Sorry.” I wished I had something better to say, but I didn’t.
“What am I going to do?” she said, her voice thick with desperation. “If he finds out, he’ll take it away, and I’ll never get it back. I need it.”
“Hold out,” I told her. “If anyone asks, we’ll tell them it was a panic attack because you’re nervous about the trip.”
Father popped back to check on us after a few minutes. The panic attack story worked, and he didn’t look too closely at Louise. I ended up staying with her for a long time. She held onto my hand like it was a lifeline and she was drowning. Her eyes got distant, but she kept on breathing and gripping. After a while, she fell asleep, still clutching my hand. I didn’t want to wake her by pulling away, and I wasn’t sleepy yet, so I grabbed a paperback book off the shelf nearby with my other hand. It was some old Asimov anthology. I read it until I fell asleep, sitting there on the floor. The next thing I remember is Cindy touching my shoulder.
“You about ready for breakfast, hon?” she asked quietly.
I snapped awake and did what I could to keep her attention off of Louise. “Yeah, that sounds good. Can I give you a hand with anything?”
“Oh no, I’ve got to earn my keep. You head on up to the main cabin. I’ll have something out for y’all in just a minute.”
She moved her hand toward Louise but I stopped her and told her Louise asked to sleep in. She didn’t seem suspicious, so I followed her out and closed the door. Back in the main cabin, most of the rest of the sibs were already up. Andrea put on another movie and Marc was shuffling cards and trying to get a game of gin going. Evan snored loudly in his chair. Father was working on something on his tablet, and Chad was trying to copy him by doing something with his. No one asked how Louise was doing. After the night before, they must have been glad that she wasn’t there snapping at them.
Louise slept for most of the rest of the flight. I alternated between sitting with her and covering for her with lies to everyone else. I tried to get her to eat, but she refused everything. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate some of her meals so the others wouldn’t know. She finally sat up again toward the end of the flight. I got her to drink a little water, but she didn’t want anything else. She asked how long until we arrived. I told her it was a couple more hours. She cried again and fell back to sleep. She was still out when Father started rebooting our implants.
Tue 09/13 08:14:36 EAT
I keep everyone out of the plane’s bedroom to cover for Louise until it’s her turn to get her implant turned back on. When she’s up next, I sneak some paper towels to her from the bathroom so she can clean up. She gives me a grateful smile.
“Might want to take precautions for the trip back,” I whisper to her.
“Yeah, I’ll reduce my dosage and taper off a couple of days before. Should help with the symptoms. Thanks for everything. Still secret keepers?”
“Yeah.”
She heads to the main cabin and keeps it together enough that no one seems to suspect anything. Father gets started on her implant and a few minutes later she’s all smiles.
Junkie.
“Good, good!” Father declares. “Now, does everyone remember our goals?”
“Preserve life—” Chad starts.
“No, sorry,” Father interrupts. “That’s always laudable, but I was referring to our more specific goals here in Djibouti.”
“Right,” Chad says, making sure he answers again before any of the rest of us have a chance. “Power generation and a large desalination plant for the capital city.”
“I still don’t see why we can’t just dig them more wells,” Marc complains. “That’s easier.”
I shake my head. We covered this a hundred times in the training sessions this summer.
“Who wants to remind Marc of the groundwater situation?” Father asks.
“There isn’t any source of new water coming into the groundwater supply for most of the year,” Evan says. “No rivers, hardly any rain outside of the rainy season. If we dig more wells to supply water to the half million people in the capital, we’d empty the wells in all the surrounding areas.”
“Very good, Evan. Now, there have already been some attempts to supply the city with fresh water through desalination. Unfortunately, the existing infrastructure only supplies enough water for about a quarter of the city’s inhabitants that way. Conventional desalination methods are also energy intensive, which is a problem. Tell us why please, Noah.”
“Their power generation is either geothermal, which they can’t scale up, or petroleum based,” I answer.
“Right!” Father declares. “So, to increase their power and water production, they’d have to correspondingly increase both their pollution output and their dependence on their neighbors across the gulf. Investment from further east has been their only other alternative, but that comes with strings that create unsustainable geopolitical situations. But back to our current mission. What’s the other big problem here that we’ll be helping with? Andrea?”
Andrea waves her hands and a stick figure image appears. A man with a pickaxe flashes then reappears with a red circle with a slash through it. Father chuckles.
“Well put. No work. A lack of jobs. Most of the available jobs are service work, many of them involved with running the port. Due to the lack of local industry or agriculture options, unemployment numbers are nearly fifty percent in the city. The desalination plant will provide water that can be used to kickstart agricultural projects and salty sludge byproducts that can be leveraged into commercial salt production as well as the extraction of valuable trace minerals. Our gift of cost-free power production will allow electrification of the entire city. There are still significant parts that have never been wired. With abundant and cheap energy and water, there will be strong incentives for local infrastructure efforts, private investment, and new business development.”
I wish he’d get on with it. We all remember this from the training sessions, except obviously Marc, and explaining it one more time won’t make a difference for him.
“One last reminder,” Father says. “Most of the people here speak some combination of Somali, Afar, Arabic, or French. But when we talk with our guides, and with any other English speakers, what two subjects will we absolutely not discuss?”
“Religion and politics,” all of us except Andrea answer in unison.
“Good. I’d hate to have this trip cut short due to misunderstandings.” He smiles his crooked smile. “Now for today: we have some preparations to see to. I will focus on growing my cloud so that I have enough nanobots to build the desalination plant superstructure tomorrow. You will all bring your clouds to as large a size as you feel you can handle. The construction algorithms scale well with the size of your clouds, so more bots will mean faster work and more time to enjoy the trip and play tourist. We’ll spend the morning at a site that has all the necessary minerals to grow as large as you feel you can. When you’ve hit capacity, you are free to explore the city with your guides. We’ll split into four pairs and each of our guides will have a vehicle, so you can head back to town as soon as you and your buddy are done building up your clouds.”
I lock eyes with Evan, and we both nod. The girls do the same with each other. Jeff sighs and looks at Marc. Marc smiles back, oblivious to his brother’s disdain. Chad’s grin tells me exactly how thrilled he is for more quality suck-up time with Father.
“We have our groupings,” Father says. “Come along now, children. I’ll introduce you to our guides.”