Oware Mosaic

by Nzondi

  “Yeah, but how old were you when you played? Eighteen, nineteen? That was a long time, ago.”

  He patted his hand on the bed. “Come here. Sit next to your baba.”

  I hesitated.

  “Come on, Otsoo! Come on.”

  Instead of sitting beside him, I sat at his feet and leaned back against the bed.

  “Ah,” he said. “Looks like my daughter is yearning for a famous baba head knocker.”

  I turned around, and said, “A what?”

  I started to get up, but he laughed and pulled me back.

  “I’m just kidding.”

  His hand raked through my hair, and I closed my eyes, remembering all the times he did that, and I fell asleep while he massaged my scalp. I could be having the worst day of my life, but as soon as his magical fingers walked on my head, all was forgotten.

  “How do you do it?” I asked.

  “Do what, Otsoo?”

  “Turn bad days into good, rubbish into gold?”

  “If I blow the dust off of my eyes, two antelopes can walk together.”

  “What does that mean, baba?”

  “It means that the benefit of having a supporter is to help you see through things. You see, Otsoo. It is better to be in a group or have a partner than to be alone.”

  “I’m independent. I like doing things on my own.”

  “The idea is more of collaboration, rather than isolation. When we walk together, we do not do it in competition but in love.”

  I thought about that for a minute. His strong hands were so soothing that I didn’t speak for a long while.

  “Who left the cabin?” I asked.

  Dad did not answer right away. “Today is Samora’s day of learning how to cope with the advantages and disadvantages of betrayal.”

  “What advantages could there be from being betrayed?”

  “The advantages, only if one chooses to see it, is that you understand that no one is free from making mistakes, sometimes the dumbest of mistakes, the worst of the worst of the worst of mistakes,”

  I giggled. “Okay, I get it, already, but what good does that do?”

  “Ah, Daughter. If you begin to understand that, you begin down the road to empathy, and that journey is one of great honor.”

  “Do you consider Lamp your daughter?”

  “No, you are my daughter. She is my student.”

  “Why can’t I be your daughter and your student?”

  “Otsoo, that is a question that only you have the answer to.”

  “I don’t understand, Dad,” I said, and got up to sit on the bed with him. “If you were alive, why didn’t you find me?”

  “First, let me say that I’ve dreamed of this day, Otsoo. I regret, and will so until my last breath, not being brave enough to see you for all these years.”

  “Brave enough?” I asked.

  “Yes. You see, I’ve always been afraid that the instant I told you I was alive, you’d be taken away from me again.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you remember the day of the frightening fire on my yacht?”

  “Yes, there’s not a day that I don’t think of that fire.”

  “After that fire, I woke up in the hospital with third-degree burns. My face was literally unrecognizable, I went through months of self-loathing and pitying myself.”

  “All this time I thought you died in the fire.”

  Dad continued, “It was your mother who had been declared dead but Dr. Shaw, who you will meet as soon—”

  “I met her in the game!”

  “Yes, you did. Dr. Shaw had been the receiving doctor at the hospital, and she had been working on developing the retcon so that it could not be affected by that nasty virus.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “She came to see me every day for two months in the hospital and hounded me until I gave her permission to save my sweetheart’s consciousness onto a retcon.”

  “Mom?”

  “Mm-hm. After she did that and proved to me that it was successful by tapping into my neural implant, I eventually asked her to do the same for me when my body conked out.”

  “I don’t understand. You died?”

  “Yes. I had a heart attack just a few hours after I made the request to Dr. Shaw, and expired. I’d already signed the paperwork—”

  “You’re a clone?”

  “Yes…I am.”

  I was still in shock, thinking my father was alive and sitting beside me. In the blink of an eye, I discovered he's not beside me but rather a clone. It was overwhelming.

  “Can we just take a step back for a moment. This is a lot to absorb.”

  “Sure Otsoo,” Dad said. “I came in here with a plan but knew, as always with children, one has to be able to adapt on the fly.”

  “I’m not a child like you once knew, Dad. I’m seventeen, now.”

  “And more beautiful than I could have ever dreamed of,” Dad said.

  He was so much more charming than I remembered, and handsome. “So you and Mom’s neural implants survived the fire, and scientists were able to transfer your consciousness into a dormant-clone? But if your body is terminated, you’re not really alive, are you? Not technically.”

  He smiled. “My clone, all clones, are living organisms, not much different from our original bodies. We are alive, Otsoo, very alive.”

  Another knock came on the door. This time, I answered.

  “Come in!” I said.

  “I looked all around for Lamp,” Kofi said. “I can’t find her.”

  “She’s been trained remarkably well,” Dad said. “Don’t you worry about her. She can handle herself. I assume she’s getting used to the enhanced senses, right about now.”

  “But the dholes,” Kofi said.

  “If I were you, son, I’d be more concerned about the dholes than her, especially now that she’s an enhuman.”

  Kofi folded his arms and looked at me. “Yeah, how did that happen?”

  “Not to be a bitchy sister, but you kind of walked in during a father-daughter moment.”

  “Oh,” Kofi said. “My bad.” He pointed to the door. “I’ll—I’ll just be leaving, now.”

  “Sit down, dork,” I said. “We’re family. You’re always invited to sit with us.”

  That took him by surprise. “Really?”

  “She knows what she’s talking about,” Dad said, chuckling. “I’d listen to her.”

  Kofi smiled and plopped on the other bed, placing his hands beneath his head and stretching out his legs on the bed.

  Shaking my head, I said. “I don’t understand. How—how did you even? I thought that Ghana had not yet had the technology to successfully grow clones.”

  Kofi sat up on his elbows. “He’s a—”

  “Shh,” I said. “Just try to keep up. “What were you saying, Dad?”

  “That’s exactly what Bete Sibaya would have the world to believe, that we don’t have the tech to successfully transfer retcons to dormant-clones. IGP Sibaya has been doing everything he can to suppress the news of our advancements.”

  “Why?”

  “I can answer that one,” Kofi said. “Greed and power.”

  Dad nodded. “I’m with you on that one.”

  “Still,” I said. “None of this has anything to do with the albino girl that’s going around committing genocide with her retcon virus.”

  “You’ll soon understand everything I’ve done in the past couple of decades has been for this moment now. Everything is connected. I’ve just been waiting for the four of you to be mature enough to be ready.”

  “The four of us?” I asked.

  “Yes, you, Samora, Durga and Tanaka.”

  “So, we’re all in this, whatever this is, together?”

  “The four of you are going to change the world.”

  “You really think highly of these girls,” Kofi said.

  “And with good reason.” Dad stood, and his knees popped. “I must admit, there’s still some getting use
d to this new body.”

  My father nodded at Kofi, and he returned the gesture.

  “What’s that all about?” I asked. “You two buds, all of a sudden?”

  “I think, Otsoo, the best way to answer your question, is to show you. Get dressed and get your energy up by feeding on the snacks I put in the refrigerator. Afterward, I’ll show you just how I think we can catch that killer.”

  ~

  “Follow me, children,” Dad said, heading for his bedroom.

  Kofi and I followed.

  “Wait, why are you going in there?”

  Dad chuckled, and said, “Watch.”

  He went over to the bookshelf and pulled out a book next to the photo albums.

  An electrical mechanism came to life, whirring like a drill struggling to drive a bit into a piece of metal. The sound emerged from beneath the king-sized bed. The bed flipped over on its side, and revealed a dark stairwell leading into the ground.

  “Now that’s what I call a hidden passageway,” Kofi said.

  “Where does this go?” I asked.

  “Mount Afadja,” Dad said. “This was the President Mbutu’s secret entrance into his underground city.”

  “But there’s a house over it,” I said.

  “Sibaya’s people were getting close to discovering this entrance, I had to camouflage it.”

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Come on, children,” Dad said.

  We went down the wide stairs into the dimly lit area. Once we were a few steps down, the bed frame eased down over the entrance and tunnel lights illuminated the entire corridor. At the end of the hallway stood an elevator.

  The doors opened the moment Dad stood in front of them.

  He said, “We are about to travel close to two kilometers deep beneath the mountain.”

  As we descended, Dad shared with us stories of what he did when he first discovered the doctors had successfully transferred his retcon into a clone. I would have enjoyed the stories more if the strangest feeling of never seeing Auntie Yajna and the twins again hadn’t swept over me.

  19

  01010100 01100001 01110100 01110101

  We went from the topsoil of the earth to the top of an underground penthouse. I stepped out of the elevator into a furniture-less living room.

  “Welcome to our glass-walled home,” Dad said. “I’m still in the middle of fixing it up.”

  “This is a rather modernist home,” I said.

  “Hardwood floors, two-story vaulted ceiling, highly-sophisticated security drones, chic bedroom suites, and over there,” he pointed is a beautiful kitchen with granite counters.”

  “What a grand night-life view,” I said.

  “It’s like New Year’s Eve in Times Square except we’re sunk beneath the earth,” Kofi said.

  “There’s a whole world down here,” I said. “How is this possible?”

  “It’s a bit of an illusion,” Dad said, taking a remote-control unit off of an instrument panel on the wall, and depressing a button. “Ocean view…”

  We now seemed to have been in an aquarium with sea life swimming outside of the walls.

  He pressed another button. “Jungle life.”

  The penthouse sat in a tropical rainforest. A mother fossa tended to her litter of six pups under a tree. On the glass wall, opposite us, there was a wide door, lined in gold.

  Dad pressed another button and the view returned to a magnificent vantage point of the lively underground city.

  Our shoes knocked against the pristine floors on our way across the room toward a steel-trimmed door. He placed his index finger on a biometric fingerprint scanner pad located on a silver lock. The mechanism beeped and he turned the handle, opening the door.

  “Can I do that?” I asked.

  Kofi said, “Once he programs it to your fingerprint.”

  “This way,” Dad gestured and held the door open allowing us to walk into a pitch-black tunnel.

  It was too dark to go on, so Kofi and I stood in the dank tunnel awaiting instructions.

  “Lesson number one,” he said. “As an enhuman, you have acute vision and hearing, but only if you focus, can those senses become an ability that few have the skill to master.”

  “I can’t see a thing in here,” I said.

  “Look into the darkness, but don’t focus on what you can’t see, focus on what you can.”

  “That, uh, would still be a negative,” I said.

  “Kofi, would you do the honors?”

  “Um, yeah. Amplifying image enhancement in our neural implants.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Night vision. How’d you do that, Kofi?”

  “I allowed you to collect the available light, including infra-red.”

  “Now look at me,” Dad said, and waved his hand.

  “I see your hand,” I said. “It’s red. As a matter of fact,” looking at my own, and then turning my attention to Kofi, “all three of us are showing red.”

  Dad said, “That’s the infra-red light giving us thermal readings. Come on,” he said. “Let us continue into the tunnel.”

  The three of us resumed walking into the dank tunnel, our footsteps echoing down the corridor.

  “We all have this capability?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Dad said. “But just like we all have the capacity to learn an insurmountable amount of data, it all depends on the individual and how they process knowledge.”

  “Wait until I teach the twins this,” I said. “Yoni will never be able to cheat again in hide-and-go-seek.”

  Dad chuckled. “I guess not.”

  “Lamp knew how to do this already?” I asked.

  “A little. However, now will she be able to fully appreciate her skill sets. What we’re passing through is actually a twenty-five-ton blast door, made by the most brilliant architects and engineers the world has ever known.”

  “The others you mentioned, Tanaka, Shaw and Durga have these capabilities?” I asked.

  “Tanaka and Durga do,” Dad said. “As well as Samora, now.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “There is no way, you could’ve had access to all of us when we were infants.”

  “I know it sounds, impossible,” Dad said. “You see, many years ago. A group of science-geek friends got together on a drunken night and decided we didn’t like the way the government treated its people. It was Samora’s father who actually decided that we should do something about it.”

  “That’s why you’ve taken her in?” I asked. “Out of personal obligation?”

  “Yes,” Dad said, nodding. “Her father had an amazing mind. Jimmy could see numbers like we could see a flower growing in a garden.”

  “Her father was one of the engineers of this place?” I asked.

  “One of?” Dad said. “He was the chief architect.”

  “This is incredible,” I said.

  We were approaching the end of the tunnel. “The ten of us, the five couples, decided that we would create a safe haven for our children,” Dad said. “One they could play in, and flourish, and be as brilliant as they wanted to be without any immoral or political pushback, or people telling them what they couldn’t do.”

  “So you guys built this underground world,” I said.

  “No,” Kofi said. “They built the House of Oware.”

  “Holy ancient elders of Accra!” I said, stopping in my place. “You—you made the House of Oware game?”

  “Your mother and I created the game, right before the boat fire.” Dad stopped. “Had I known it wasn’t safe for you to be in contact with us, Otsoo, I would’ve put you in foster care myself. Believe me, I fought with your mother on many occasions, but I was too naive to believe anyone would go to the lengths they did to stop our progress on gene coding and recombinant DNA technology. There are many people who disapproved of the work we were doing. It’s why I contacted Kofi, years ago, to be my eyes and ears.”

  “You knew about this all this time, Kofi?” I asked.


  “Cat’s out of the bag, now,” Kofi said.

  “Why torture me like that?”

  “I had to keep up the appearances,” he said.

  I punched him. “Dork!”

  He laughed and tried to dodge me. “At your service.”

  We approached the end of the passageway and walked out into a dark alley that had locked iron gates on each end. The air was cool, and the odor of granite was irrefutable. We followed Dad, as he picked up his step and hurried down to his right. He held his hand up, gesturing for us to stop where we were, and he opened the gate. Dad’s head turned left and then right. He walked out.

  “Clear, he said, gesturing for us to come. “Let’s go.”

  I was the last to walk through the gate. A CCTV drone whizzed by, overhead. The air held wafts of nastiness like an abandoned unfinished basement that had been flooded ages ago and never fully recovered. Still, the streets weren’t deserted but were full of life and electric like a Las Vegas lounge casino.

  In the narcissistic temperament that irony worked, the liveliness was just a facade of the pain endured by every city dweller. My flesh crawled, observing sidewalks filled with people whose private woes seemed displayed for all the public to see due to the radiation-exposed deformities they carried on their faces and bodies. Many of their gazes carried deep hopelessness but their attire said otherwise. They wore robes, dashikis, and dresses colored with pride and branded for expensive tastes.

  I’d seen disfigured people before, I mean, who hadn’t, but never had I seen so many all at one time. For the first time, I wondered why I hadn’t seen more. There had always been rumors that through generations of genetic stubbornness, some families developed bloodlines that became immune to the effects of radiation. I, for one, didn’t think that was possible.

  Maybe our community hadn’t been hit hard by the consequences of nuclear war, or maybe those people had gone into hiding. I had a pretty good guess to where they’d gone. These people turned their backs on the poor who couldn’t afford to live in such a place and escaped underground, to a city where radiation didn’t affect them as much. I hated to admit it, but some of the things Frankie criticized made a lot of sense. That still didn’t give her the right to kill innocent people.