Wed 09/21 08:19:07 EAT
“It seems the events of yesterday morning may have instigated something of a kerfuffle. I’ve received an advisory that more armed insurgents have been spotted in the area where we were planning to work today. The risk of violence is higher than I’m comfortable taking you into,” Father says as we finish breakfast and begin loading the trucks. “So we’re going to skip the last of our planned desalination plants for Somalia and begin our work in Ethiopia early.”
Me and the rest of the small circle of siblings gathered around him take the news without complaint and get back to work breaking camp. I stow my pack and sleeping bag in the pickup bed and do a quick double-check of the shelter to make sure we didn’t leave anything. I give the floor a quick sweep with my bots, leaving it clean for whoever comes along next. I feel good today. Lighter. The tumultuous swirl of hate and love for Father is quiet for the first time since I found out he killed Mom. I’m not over it, but maybe I could get used to this. No more need to plot and scheme and look for openings and figure out how not to get caught.
We pile into the van. Bashir is driving today. He backtracks to Berbera then heads south. A faded sign says “Road Number 1” in English and some other script I can’t read. I wonder if it’s the first modern road they ever built here. It isn’t anything fancy—the aging asphalt has plenty of bumps—but it’s smoother than the dirt roads and cross country runs I’ve been dealing with all week. Even with the potholes, the hum of the tires on the road is soothing. I lean my head against the window and let it lull me.
I feel sleep coming. I don’t fight it.
My clock skips forward and I taste the subtle change in the flavor of my own mouth that tells me that I napped. Awake again, I notice the van is moving at a crawl. I lift up my head and look out the front windshield to see what’s going on. The road ahead is blocked by camels, a good sized herd. Or is it a caravan of camels? I should know the name for a group of them, but I can’t remember it. Chad, up in the front seat on sentry duty, is looking at them with his usual suspicious glare. There’s nothing to worry about. He would have woken us all up a while ago if the camels had been packing any weapons. We get past them and the road hums again, lulling me into a place halfway between here and sleep.
My mind clock jumps another hour. We slow down again to pass a donkey cart. I glance back past through the dusty rear windshield. Father is still behind us in one of the pickups, riding with Ahmed. I look ahead and can’t see Kofi and Ibrahim’s trucks anymore. I think someone said they were going ahead of us to the border station. When we finally catch up to them, we get the VIP treatment. Big smiles and a wave right through into Ethiopia. They must have greased a few palms.
I rest my head against the window again. Not quite sleeping, just mellow. This drive day has been a nice break. It feels like we’ve been going non-stop for so long, even though it’s barely been more than a week. Everyone in the van is quiet, without even the standard jabber from Marc’s motormouth. I glance at him with one of my eyes. He’s out cold. If he were awake, I’d be tempted to ask for another story.
We stop in a town called Jijiga for a late lunch. It’s a more modern place than anything we’ve seen since Djibouti City. And green. Surprisingly green. It has a squared-off grid of streets like Denver does. I feel a twinge of homesickness. Not for the campus, but for my old home. For Mom.
We eat at a restaurant inside a hotel. They do meats and sauces on top of spongy flatbread like we’ve gotten used to, but the Ethiopian variation of the bread is bigger than the Somali version, like the size of a big pizza for just one piece of it. The seasonings they use are different too, but just as good. The roasted goat is delicious.
Back on the road, belly full, the clock skips ahead again. The bumps of a dirt road beneath us rouses me. It’s just after sundown when we stop for the night. There are some lights off in the distance, the kerosene lanterns they use in the villages around here.
“I’ll see to the shelter tonight. You children go ahead and stretch your legs,” Father calls out as we pile out of the van’s side door. “And you’re finally free from the terrible voice of Father in your ears all day. This region is fairly safe, so you don’t need to keep your earpieces on all the time.”
A patch of ground illuminated by the truck’s lights churns and flattens. Walls climb from the ground, and the roof grows up out from them. My legs are feeling normal again by the time the new shelter is done. Father glances over to the side of the building, and a battery module grows from the wall at ground level. He must have charged it from his bots’ batteries, because the lights pop on inside, cool and bright. A moment later, the exterior lights come on.
This part is automatic by now. We unload our gear from the trucks and lay it out in the shelter. In a few minutes, the camp is all set up. Ibrahim pulls up in the last truck and brings out our dinner. He must have found a place not too far from here because the food is still piping hot. We sit on tailgates or on the front step of the shelter and dig in. Kofi passes around some bug repellant as we finish up, which is good because the bugs here get scary big.
Both of my sisters look over at me.
“Hey Noah, want to take a little walk?” Louise asks.
“Can we, Father?” I ask. I feel like when I was a kid and had to ask Mom for permission to play outside.
“You may,” he replies, smiling at us paternally. “Just don’t go too far, and stay together. Keep where you can see the shelter lights. Oh, and stay away from the village at least for the next hour until our guides have had a chance to talk to them.”
Andrea, Louise, and I stroll away from the group. Once we’re out of earshot, Louise pulls out her earpiece and makes a clear point of turning it off. I do the same, and Andrea follows suit. Louise does something with her bots that I can’t quite catch. It’s some program that’s not in her files back at school, but it pulls her cloud in a couple of meters away from us and gives the air a buzzy feel. Did she figure out how to make force fields or something? Before I can ask, Louise turns to Andrea with a serious look.
“What’s going on, Andrea? What’s been eating you?”
OK, good. It wasn’t just me who noticed it.
“Yeah,” I add, “you’ve been acting weird for a couple of days now. What’s up?”
Andrea turns away from us and shakes her head.
“Are you OK?” I ask.
She turns back slowly, tears streaming down her face.
“What happened?” I ask more gently. I’ve never seen her like this. “Did someone hurt you?”
She shakes her head and puts up a finger, telling us to wait as she gets a distant look in her eyes. She turns to me and gestures to point at me first, then Louise. Her other hand waves and a cartoonish lock appears in the air.
“The secret keeper thing?” Louise asks.
“Hey, that was private!” I say, trying with limited success to keep my voice down.
“I had to tell Andrea I had a secret keeper. I tell Andrea everything. Well, almost everything. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her any of your secrets.”
“Fine. I guess you’re not the worst secret keeper ever then. So Andrea knows we share secrets.” I probe Louise’s force field with my bots. I think it’s some kind of eavesdropping protection. She must have known this conversation was going to get into sensitive territory.
Andrea nods. Then she points at herself, then Louise, and then me, and the lock reappears. Her eyes pose the question.
“You want us all to be secret keepers?”
She nods.
“I won’t tell anyone anything you tell us,” I promise.
“Same for me. Now, what’s going on?” Louise asks gently.
Andrea holds up a finger again, waits a moment, then her fingers start dancing. A sketch of a road appears floating in the air. A pair of boxes with wheels materialize beside it. Stick figures get out of the wheel boxes. One is taller than the rest. All but two of them have plain round heads. The two have stylized swooshes of hair, one black, one yellow.
“That’s us getting out of the cars,” Louise says.
The stick figures duck down, and all but the tall one get swallowed up in cartoonish eggs.
“The morning of the attack,” I say quietly. Andrea nods to confirm.
One of the eggs expands, then opens back up to reveal the girl stick figure with the yellow hair. The egg closes back up, but a small hole opens up in it, and a cartoonish eye peeks out.
“You put an eyehole in your shield? You could have been killed!” I try to stay quiet, but how could she do something so reckless? “How did you even do that? We can’t access that code.”
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“That was probably my fault,” Louise answers for her. “My hack that gets me into trouble also lets me override a lot of other things. I have admin access to the implant, and I showed Andrea how to do it too.”
“You still need to teach me that trick,” I remind her, “and now I really want it.”
“I will,” she promises, “but later. Go on Andrea.”
Another pair of wheeled boxes appear in the image, these ones bigger and green. Jumping from the back of one of them are surprisingly detailed little army men. They look just like the plastic toys I had when I was a kid, contrasting sharply with the crude outlines of everything else. The eye in Andrea’s egg turns and points at them. The army men wave at the tall stick figure. Then they start melting. But instead of solid green insides like my old toys, these turn red and juicy as their surfaces peel away. Their guns go off in wild directions until each one forms a red puddle on the floating road. A moment later, the guns melt away too, then the trucks. The red puddles slide off of the road to the side away from the eggs, then slowly disappear.
The eggs all shake and then hatch, and all the stick figures that emerge have big smiles, except for the little Andrea from the egg with the eye. She’s got a big sad frown. The image fades.
“Oh, shit,” Louise whispers. “He killed them all,”
Well, that changes things.
Why would he slaughter them like that? He could have just done what he said he did, slag their weapons and let them go. It’s not like they were a threat to him. He really is the monster that I thought he was.
"I was going to let it go,” I mutter. “I was going to let it all go.”
“What?” asks Louise, turning toward me.
“There’s something I need to tell you both,” I begin.
We talk for a long time in Louise’s sphere of silence. Hushed words and tiny images. Eventually, Chad comes to find us and tells us to go to bed. We walk back slowly, minds full and hearts heavy. Father is already asleep when we get back to the shelter. Good. I don't want to see him right now.
Thu 09/22 06:54:27 EAT
It’s time to get to work. The discussions from last night are still churning in my brain, but today is our first time building in front of an audience of regular people that will be using our creations. I need to focus on the job at hand.
“The trouble here,” Father reminds us as we gather near the shelter door, “is that water is available, but it’s usually in dirty streams that in many cases are a long walk from the village. So the people, especially the women of the villages, end up spending a great deal of their time carrying jugs back and forth hauling water. The situation is worsened because the water is often contaminated. A well in the middle of each village with a solar-powered pump and a water filtration system will make a tremendous difference for them. The scale of these projects may be smaller than the ones we’ve been working on so far, but the impact is no less important.”
We all nod. Andrea and Louise are doing a decent job of keeping their faces normal. I check my own with my floating bot eyes. My expression isn’t giving away anything at all. Of course, I have a little more practice at this than they do. We never decided on what to do about Father, but they at least agreed that we can’t let what he’s done stand. I pray to Mom’s ghost that I can talk them into helping me kill him, but I don’t think they’re ready to jump to that yet. Maybe I can ease them into a murder plot slowly.
“We’ll split into two teams,” Father continues. “Each one will have an assigned village for the morning. Today’s intel report said it’s safe enough in this area that we don’t need to dedicate anyone to sentry duty. Just keep your eyes peeled and you’ll be fine. On each team, two will be on power duty, two on water duty. Chad, Marc, and Andrea, you’ll get the village near our camp with me. The rest of you, take the van with Kofi and go to work at the next village down the road. When you finish, our guides will take you to the next town. Do your best work, these people are counting on you. I’m counting on you.”
Our road turns out to be a dirt track barely wide enough for the truck, but Kofi navigates it well enough. A short ride later, we’re at our build site. The cluster of round huts with conical roofs look like they’re made out of nothing but sticks and mud. A crowd greets our arrival. Based on the number of huts and people, this is probably everyone that lives here, and maybe some visiting onlookers. Kofi talks to one of the men in a language I don’t understand. The man responds in the same tongue in a booming voice, apparently more for his fellow townsfolk than for Kofi.
“You can get started,” Kofi tells us. “They’re excited to see what you can do.”
We thank him and follow his lead into the middle of the village. A circle of stones placed on the ground tells us where to put the well. Evan and I get started on that as Kofi leads Jeff and Louise to where the solar panels will go.
The adult villagers watch us for a couple of minutes, then mostly go back about their business. Some older ones sit down and watch us. The kids are all enthralled by our work, probably because Evan has started showing off and making the dirt from the well hole spray up in a fountain before he makes it settle into a neat pile off to the side. My trains of bots are doing the job the smart but boring way, climbing the sides of the narrow shaft. It's more efficient since they can carry a lot more when they’re crawling than when they’re flying, but I can’t deny that it’s fun to see the kids’ reactions as the dirt clumps pop up out of the ground. It’s like when the little kids back at the campus would watch us train for this, but better.
Kofi snaps shots of our work with his camera between saying reassuring-sounding words that I can’t understand to the adults. I feel self-conscious the first dozen times he points it at me, but before long I just ignore it and focus on the work. I harden and seal the sides of the well as we go down so that once we hit the water table the shaft will be good to go. About 50 meters down, we hit muddy gravel. Nice, we don’t have to punch through any rock. This one will be easy.
“You want to do the pump or the top side stuff?” I ask Evan.
“I’ll get the pump, you need to show these kids that you’re fun too,” he says, laughing.
“I’ll never be as fun as you, brother,” I assure him. “But I’ll see what I can do.”
BUILD(STORAGE-TANK)
My bots get to work. A wide, shallow hole forms near the well shaft. The surface of it starts lining itself with smooth ceramic. The walls keep coming up above ground level, growing slowly layer by layer until the tank is about ten feet tall. The kids watch with wide eyes. They’re all sitting down in a big circle around us now. They can’t see the underground filtration pipe connecting the well shaft to the tank, but I feel the twinge when the maintenance bots detach from my cloud to take up permanent residence there. Those bots will clean the filters from now until the end of time. As long as there is water in the ground, this village will have plenty of it.
BUILD(PUMP-CONTROLS)
The electronic components take longer, since the bots need to find the right metals, and making anything with transistors always takes them a while. There aren’t a ton of the trace metals that the semiconductors require in the dirt we pulled out from the well shaft, so my bots need to spread out and search for a bit. There. Found some. I feel them hauling it back. The control box forms, growing out of one side of the tank. The children on that side ooh and aah, and the ones sitting on the other side run around to see what’s going on. Wires extend out and down the sides of the well, near where Evan is building the underground pump. I’ll let him connect to those and take it from there.
I look over and see that Jeff and Louise have the flywheel and a good dozen solar panels done. The children follow me like I’m the Pied Piper as I walk to the flywheel box and back, connecting up the twisted pairs of wires in their sturdy casing that grow up from the ground. I check the control box. Power is on and everything looks good. As soon as the pump is finished, we can seal up the shaft. I’ve got a few minutes to burn while Evan finishes working on that.
“Hey kids, watch this,” I say, knowing that they don’t understand a word.
LIGHT-SHOW
I wave my hands and a dozen multicolored orbs the size of baseballs appear. I twiddle my fingers, and they spin around my hands. The kids are loving it. I send a few of the balls toward one of the smaller ones with a gesture. As they fly, they widen and change the center of their orbit so they end up spinning around the kid in lazy circles. He gawks in wonder and he’s suddenly the most popular little guy in the village. Another gesture and the lights start changing colors. The braver, older kids reach out their hands to touch them. I time a twitch of my thumb so that when their fingers get near the orbs, they explode out into a thousand tiny specks like bubbles popping. The kids all laugh and squeal with joy.
I need to hear that. I need to remember that there’s happiness in the world and not just bastards who think they can kill anyone they want to and get away with it.
Another wave of my hands sends lights zipping around, just out of reach of the children. I smile as one jumps and catches a light, only to have it evaporate as his fingers close around it.
Of course Father can get away with it. He doesn’t leave any evidence. All the minerals in those soldiers’ bodies are probably part of the maintenance nanobots spread out across a thousand solar panels by now. The unusable compounds from their corpses have probably decomposed already. I’m sure some bugs had a great time in the desert that day, finding a gooey feast just under the sand.
It looks like Evan is done. I wrap up my light show and start walking back to the well’s tank. How many “accidents” has Father caused? How many inconvenient people have had well-timed heart attacks or aneurysms or other things that Father could have caused without raising any suspicions? I’m going to need to do some research when we get back. If he killed Mom, and he slaughtered those soldiers, killing can’t be a new thing for him.
Evan pulls me out of my thoughts.
“Noah, pay attention,” he calls out. “I said, fire it up.”
“Yeah, sorry. On it.”
I open the control panel and point out the big green button for the kids to see. I push it and hear the hum and gurgle as the pump kicks on and water starts filling the tank. I wait a moment to let it fill a bit, then turn the handle on the spigot and put my hands in the cold, clear water that flows from it. I cup my hand and pull some back to my mouth.
It’s good. Better than the stuff they sell in bottles.
The kids rush the tank, laughing and splashing each other. One of the women who’d been watching from outside the ring of children grabs a water jug and calls to the kids to get out of her way. At least I think that’s what she’s saying. It definitely has that effect. She puts her big, yellow jerry can under the gushing stream and smiles as it quickly fills. If our briefings were right, she just doubled her free hours in the day. Kofi almost drops the camera as he gets mobbed by the children while trying to get a good angle to document the moment.
“Good job, brother,” Evan tells me.
I nod. I wish we had time to set up a water tower and indoor plumbing and a proper sewer system. I want to do so much more for these kids who laugh and smile and remind me of all the good in the world. But we’re supposed to get four more villages like this done today, so we can’t. Maybe they can do something like that for themselves with the greater wealth and free time that free access to power and water brings. I guess that’s part of the point of this, bootstrapping prosperity by getting basic needs under control.
We walk to the van, passing around the edge of the new solar field. A bunch of the younger kids follow, waving and moving their hands in circles, making zooming noises. I think we have time for one more quick display before we head out.
LIGHT-SHOW